A last minute agreement with Qantas engineers averted a planned industrial action and engineers indicate they will accept a smaller increase in their wage demand and remain on the job.

Sharan Burrow, ACTU president has asked the Australian Licensed Engineers Association (ALEA) to call off its four-hour stop-work meeting planned for tomorrow afternoon. Had the stop-work taken place, Qantas had said would be forced to cancel a number of domestic flights.

According to Ms. Burrow, the engineers would be willing to accept a raise somewhere in between the 5 percent they demanded and the 3 percent Qantas has offered continuiously over the previous 18 months of failed wage negotiations.

The final amount was not immediately known and no one has said if Qantas will pay more than 3 percent they had left on the table at previous talks.

Early reports today claimed Qantas had been offering non-union workers $100,000 for six months work in a bid to break the planned strike. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that documents showed Qantas had also offered a $40,000 “completion bonus”.

However, Qantas spokesman would not comment on those reports. The airline stands to make a $1.5 billion profit this financial year.

ALEA federal secretary Steve Purvinas said most of the potential strike-breakers would have been expat engineers returning home from Malaysia. Purvinas said had they gotten the amount demanded they stood to earn three times more than Qantas’s current engineers. He also had said there were also rumours that union engineers will be locked-out of their workplace.

www.qantas.com.au