JUNEAU -- State ferry unions are working without contracts as the Parnell administration tries to push down what it says are some generous wages in the Alaska Marine Highway System.

Tuesday, one ferry union's members approved a tentative contract, another was talking strike and a third was still in negotiations.

The focus currently is on the union that represents ferry captains and other top officers, the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots. Its members voted down a tentative contract this month.

Union representative Ron Bressette said the MMP has had to set a deadline of Thursday by which to get an agreement with the state, but not necessarily on a contract. At this point they're trying to agree on future negotiations, he said, including possible binding arbitration.

If that doesn't happen it could come to a strike, which he called a "job action."

"We're working with the state to try to prevent that from happening," he said.

It's been decades since a ferry strike, and one has never come from his union, Bressette said.

"The MMP have never had a job action against the state of Alaska in the history of the Alaska Marine Highway System," he said.

But they've never been this close to a strike before, he said.

Representatives of the other two ferry unions say their members won't cross MMP picket lines.

The Inlandboatmen's Union of Alaska approved the tentative contract, said Ricky Deising, the union's regional representative. The third union, the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, hopes to have its tentative contract finalized and sent to members for a vote within two weeks, director Ben Goldrich said.

Tentative three-year contracts agreed to by negotiators for the three unions, and approved by IBU, call for no pay raises in the current year, a 1 percent raise next year and 2 percent the following year.

Department of Administration Commissioner Curtis Thayer said the state's negotiators had previously made big concessions, including backing off a demand that cost-of-living differentials be removed for new employees.

"One of the things that we did to reach agreement was to take that off the table -- it was a huge give on our part," Thayer said.

The contracts are based on Seattle wages, with pay in Alaska set 20 percent higher than that, he said.

Thayer pointed out that the state's largest ferry union, the IBU, had voted overwhelmingly to ratify the tentative contract. MMP voted it down only narrowly, he said, after its negotiating team agreed to it.

Thayer said he did not yet know why MMP members voted it down or if it was because of the lack of a raise this year.

"This group of employees makes $172,000 a year, so it is a highly compensated group of employees," he said.

The current offered increase of "zero-one-two" over three years is much better than the previous three-year contract, which was "zero-zero-zero," he said. Legislative Republican leaders had demanded no increases at all, and the Legislature will still have to approve funding for any increases, he said.

Following the contract rejection by MMP members, issues ranging from cost-of-living differential and annual raises may both be back on the table.

IBU's Deising said that his union got the same zero-one-two increase as did the other union, as well as several smaller changes to individual positions that will now be paid industry standard wages.

The state negotiators themselves suggested those increases, Deising said.

"It's something they offered because they ran out of employees," he said.

When the ferry system couldn't fill those positions they had to pay overtime to existing employees, he said.

But if MMP can't reach agreement, "our members would not cross their picket lines," he said.

MEBA's Goldrich said his members would do the same. "We honor the Mates' picket line," he said.

The goal among all the unions is to have agreements in time for the cost to be included in Gov. Parnell's budget proposal for the Legislature.