Qantas baggage handlers and other ground staff will strike next week, even as the union representing the airlines maintenance engineers suspends its own industrial action against the airline.

The Transport Workers Union this afternoon announced a fresh round of strikes.

The union, representing baggage handlers, ramp handlers, catering staff and aircraft cleaners announced strikes at Sydney, Canberra and Cairns airports next Wednesday.

TWU members will walk off the job at Sydney for three hours from 7:00 a.m., Cairns from 7:00 a.m. for one hour and at Canberra for an hour from 4:30 p.m., local times.

Those strikes are in addition to one-hour stoppages slated for Melbourne where 1,000 workers will strike from 8:00 a.m., and 700 workers at Brisbane from 7:00 a.m.

The union has called the strikes over an impasse in pay and conditions talks.

"There are clearly two sets of rules at Qantas: if you're in senior management, the sky is the limit; if you safely prepare an aircraft for take-off, you are offered nothing", said TWU National Secretary, Tony Sheldon. Sadly, it seems the only room for expenditure growth is in executive salaries.

Earlier, the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association called off all industrial action for three weeks.

Its move was presented as a "challenge" to Qantas to get its grounded aircraft back in the skies, rather than blaming the union for a maintenance backlog, union officials said.

The union maintains that some of the aircraft are grounded because the airline had slated them for disposal.

No agreement has been reached over enterprise bargaining talks over job security issues.

The parties are prepared to continue negotiations.

Qantas's head of operations Lyell Strambi said the airline "remained committed to good faith negotiations" with the engineers but "cannot agree to unreasonable demands that would restrict our business".

"If this [the union's log of claims] was agreed to it would make Qantas significantly less competitive and hold us back from introducing modern maintenance techniques used by airlines around the world," he said.

But the federal secretary of the union said Qantas would need to reconsider their position on their job security claims.

"Our pay claim of three percent is modest and below inflation," Steve Purvinas said.

"Our real focus has always been on job security." As Qantas relocates to Asia, which they have made no bones about, the jobs of Australian licenced engineers will slowly be made redundant.

"We simply want to prevent a situation where all heavy maintenance for the Qantas fleet is done in cheap Asian facilities to lower standards," he said.

There seems little hope of the March offer being accepted, given the public acrimony between the parties involved, without either side being prepared to compromise.

The impasse -- and the damage being done in the travel industry, as 60,000 passengers have been caught up in strikes and the airline pulls a further 88,000 seats from sale -- has sparked calls for government invention.