ACTU president Ged Kearney believes the federal parliament can stop the Fair Work Commission’s decision to cut penalty rates if government MPs cross the floor to support a Labor bill.

The federal opposition will put forward a bill in the parliament to reverse the decision to cut Sunday rates for workers in retail and hospitality.

“We need some to break away from the government to get through the lower house, in this crazy parliament that is not impossible,” Kearney told Sky News on Sunday.

Kearney said the trade union movement will refuse to join any mitigation to phase in the penalty cut.

“I don’t care if you mitigate over one, two, three or five years, it is still a pay cut,” she said.

“This is really an outrage.”

She said there was no evidence anywhere in the world to support the claim that cutting pay will actually create jobs.

Unions say they have legal advice that a decision to cut penalty rates in the hospitality and retail sectors could open to door to changes for other workers.

On Friday, Kearney said despite the FWC’s decision to align Sunday rates with Saturday relating to less than a handful of awards, the ACTU believes the factors considered might be applied to other sectors.

“The independent legal advice we received on the FWC penalty rate decision said nurses, teachers, community, disability, social, and transport workers, among many others, are also at risk of losing their penalty rates,” she said.

Meanwhile, former prime minister John Howard has been caught up in nationwide protests against penalty rate cuts after he stumbled into an angry union rally in Sydney’s CBD.

Rallies organised by the CFMEU were held in every mainland capital city except Perth on Thursday with thousands marching in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Howard needed to be “rescued by police” after inadvertently coming across the Sydney march protesting cuts to penalty rates and the return of the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

The 77-year-old former Liberal leader had been attending a conference in the city when he walked out onto the street to find dozens of people shouting, booing him, holding up flags and making profane gestures.

Footage on social media shows him having to walk several hundred metres along Pitt St, flanked by a number of NSW police, as noisy protesters repeatedly chanted “the workers, united, will never be defeated”.

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