West Coast union dockworkers approve new 3-year contract.

L.A. may have the nation's largest port complex, but its battalion of dockworkers apparently don't hold much sway over their counterparts at competing West Coast ports.

The International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, which represents some 8,000 dockworkers from Seattle to San Diego, narrowly approved a new labor contract last week. That approval came despite an overwhelming vote by L.A. dockworkers to reject the contract.

Final results of the vote will not be available until this week. But one insider said the local dockhands overwhelmingly rejected the proposed contract, 1,692 to 771.

Some local shipping officials were still wary last week about the possibility of slowdowns, or wildcat actions, by the 2,400-odd members of Wilmington-based Local 13, which represents dockworkers in the huge Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor complex.

Local 13 members reportedly are angered by new contract provisions that would disrupt arrangements between certain union members, known as steady-men, or "steadies," and certain members of the Pacific Maritime Association, the 100-member organization of shipping, stevedore and terminal companies that contract with the ILWU for labor.

Such steadymen only work for a single shipping terminal company, rather than moving about the docks, and earn as much as $130,000 annually.

The ILWU President Brian MacWilliams declared in a recent letter tO members that the steadyman deals and the union "cannot survive side by side."

ILWU members who work at least 2,000 hours or more a year average $84,663 a year, according to Pacific Maritime literature.

Despite such pay - or perhaps sensing such pay was endangered - Local 13 members gave the thumb's down on the proposed contract by a 2.5-1 margin, and union workers in San Francisco voted down the proposed contract 5-1.

However, the two strike-prone locals were outvoted by other locals in West Coast port cities, and it is the vote of the entire region that counts, not a particular local.

Many in Los Angeles shipping circles were rattled by a Sept. 19 Wall Street Journal report that a wharf strike this fall seemed likely.

But voting concluded Sept. 23, and last week the count indicated the union rank-and-file had accepted a 15 percent pay increase, spread out over the next three years.

"You can put that story (about a strike) in the wastebasket," trumpeted one Los Angeles shipping official last week, who asked not to be identified. "The vote was for ratification by 62 percent."

At the San Francisco-based Pacific Maritime Association, Vice President Terry Lane last week confirmed a settlement had been reached. "We have been notified by the union of a favorable ratification," said Lane.

The ratification undoubtedly comes as welcome news to Southern California importers, exporters and port officials, as well as shipping lines with local terminals.

For Los Angeles, the economic results of a local wildcat strike, or a prolonged set of slowdowns and labor actions, could have been bitter.

The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle more tonnage than any other in the nation, directly creating thousands of jobs, and indirectly creating up to 250,000 jobs in Southern California, according to estimates of local economists (by comparison, there are about 3.8 million jobs at establishments in Los Angeles County).

A vast network of importers, exporters, expediters, truckers, financiers, warehousers and others work in trade-related industries.

Indeed, a full quarter of the nation's containerized cargo - the most common form of shipping today - passes through the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbors.

The twin ports berthed more than 5,000 vessels, transporting roughly 2.6 million 40-foot containers, in the fiscal year ended June 1996.

In addition, about 575,000 automobiles, largely imported from Japan or the Far East, passed through the ports, in the most-recent reported fiscal year.

In 1996 through August, the federal Los Angeles Customs District, which is dominated by Los Angeles-Long Beach traffic, has counted roughly $5.2 billion a month in exports, and $8.3 billion in imports.

Many local business titans import through the ports - shoemaker L.A. Gear, toymaker Mattel Inc., agribusiness giant Dole Food Co. Inc., to just name a few.