Aircraft engineers with Australia's largest airline, Qantas, have called off stopwork action which threatened to disrupt domestic flights on Friday.

The engineers are locked in a dispute over a wage deal and had accused Qantas of recruiting strike breakers from the Asia-Pacific to thwart industrial action.

But the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Sharan Burrow, says she has asked unions to postpone their industrial action.

She wants Qantas management to come back to the bargaining table, but says the engineers' union is not backing down.

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