Plans to expand New York’s television service are back on track after Verizon and 65,000 workers narrowly averted a strike yesterday.

A new contract was hammered out hours before a midnight deadline. The company and its two labor unions had been negotiating furiously to avoid potentially delaying a rollout of Verizon’s television and Internet products in New York City.

The contract, which must be ratified by employees, will raise wages by almost 11% over three years. It also will create about 2,500 new union jobs, according to the Communications Workers of America, which represents about 50,000 workers at Verizon.

“This is a breakthrough agreement in many ways,” the union’s president, Larry Cohen, said in a statement. “It creates new union jobs including major growth areas like FiOS, it takes a big step forward on health care and it brings hundreds of Verizon Business employees the union rights they deserve.”

The company said it won important concessions that would reduce health care costs in the long term. While Verizon would continue to pay insurance premiums for current employees, its contributions for workers hired in the future would be limited.

“Health care costs were a big issue for us,” a company spokesman, Eric Rabe, said. “Over time, this is a very important provision that will be worth a lot of money.”

Verizon representatives declined to speculate on the effect a strike might have had on its operations. But the dispute appeared to come at a critical time for the company’s FiOS television service, which was recently introduced in New York City and is in a fierce competition for customers.

A strike had originally been planned for August 3 but was postponed until Monday at midnight after signs of progress in the negotiations. The work stoppage would have involved 65,000 employees in 10 Eastern states, many of whom maintain Verizon’s Internet and landline connections.