Georgia-Pacific and the United Steelworkers, the union that represents about 700 employees at the company’s Wauna Mill, signed a new four-year labor agreement earlier this month.

Kristi Ward, a spokeswoman for Wauna Mill, the largest employer in Clatsop County, said the company and the union had been negotiating for more than a year and a half. She thanked employees for keeping up safety and efficiency during bargaining.

Bill Kerr, president of Local 1097, said the union took negotiations very seriously, with representatives from every mill at national-level negotiations. The local agreement coincided with a national four-year labor deal between the United Steelworkers and Georgia-Pacific. United Steelworkers is the largest industrial union in North America, representing about 10,000 Georgia-Pacific workers at 43 locations, along with 130,000 paper workers and more than 850,000 workers nationwide.

“When we began meeting with (Georgia-Pacific) more than a year ago we had legitimate concerns that this round of bargaining would not end well,” Jon Geenan, vice president of the United Steelworkers’ paper sector, said in a release earlier this month.

Georgia-Pacific, Geenan said, had been trying to replace one-third of the workforce with temporary workers with little to no benefits, proposed to reduce the wages of current employees by 20 to 30 percent and sought to cut vacation allotment.

Those proposals “made us all wonder how we would find a path to a fair deal that preserved the very reasons we tolerate shift work, working weekends and holidays, and the sometimes dangerous conditions that exist in our facilities — and ensuring a shot at future investment at the same time.”

The union’s release said the new labor agreement avoided the proposed cuts, improved income and benefits, enhanced insurance for death and dismemberment, kept above-average pensions, protected local bargaining rights and formed an agreement to focus on solving longer-term issues with excessive overtime.

Kerr said this is the second time United Steelworkers has negotiated a contract with Georgia-Pacific since the company was purchased for $21 billion in 2005 by Koch Industries, owned by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.