Cleared: Qantas engineers call off strike Posted on May 15th
ACTU president Sharan Burrow has asked the Australian Licensed Engineers Association (ALEA) to call off its four-hour stop-work meeting planned for tomorrow afternoon, which Qantas had said would force it to cancel a number of domestic flights.
Ms Burrow said the engineers would be willing to accept a rise somewhere in between the 5 per cent they demanded and the 3 per cent Qantas had continued to offer over the previous 18 months of failed wage negotiations.
However it was not immediately clear if Qantas would be prepared to pay more than 3 per cent.
The union said earlier that it had not expected the strike to cause cancellations, but Qantas boss Geoff Dixon had said some flights would be cut if the stop-work had gone ahead.
Reports this morning claimed Qantas (qan.ASX:Quote,News) 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”.
A 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. Mr Purvinas said they stood to earn three times more than Qantas’s current engineers.
Mr Purvinas had said there were also rumours that union engineers will be locked-out of their workplace.
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