A Look at What’s in Store for Business and Workers : It won’t be dull, that’s for sure. The new year will see dramatic changes for U.S. industry and the American worker. Business writers at The Times polled experts on what is likely to happen in 1989. Here is their report. : HEAVY INDUSTRY

The dollar remains the dominant factor in the turnaround in heavy industry. Import quotas on foreign steel, set to expire in 1989, are likely to be extended. President-elect Bush pledged to do so near the end of the campaign. After nearly a decade of losses, the major steelmakers are profitable once more, and should continue to make money in 1989.

America’s machine tool makers have been helped by the lower dollar, but not much. Despite quotas on foreign machine tools, the Japanese and Germans have captured so much of the market--and the Japanese have now built or bought so many machine tool plants in this country--that the domestic makers are finding it tough to recapture lost markets. Their response, likely to be seen again in 1989, is to form joint ventures with the Japanese.

The heavy-equipment makers, such as Caterpillar and John Deere, have rebounded. The drought hurt farm equipment sales just as farmers were starting to buy new machinery for the first time in years, and Tenneco, which earlier merged International Harvester’s farm equipment line with its J. I. Case division, is still plagued by losses and is now talking about getting out of the business. But for Cat and others, foreign sales of construction equipment are soaring, and the Japanese are finding the U.S. market increasingly difficult.