SALISBURY, Md. – Dresser-Wayne, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, brought in 50 scabs Sept. 18 in an attempt to break a nine-week strike by 400 production workers at its plant here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Three vans arrived with the strikebreakers, accompanied by six goons, at 8 that morning.

"They’ve come to take people’s jobs," declared Jack Hughes, president of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 354, which represents the strikers. "That’s about as low as you can get. That’s the Halliburton company doing this. This is their management style – threatening and intimidating people."

The workers here, who produce state-of-the-art gasoline pumps for service stations, walked off their jobs July 12 in a dispute over job security, early retirement and gain sharing. Dresser, as it’s known locally, is one of Salisbury’s largest employers, together with the non-union Frank Perdue poultry corporation. Halliburton Industries, employs 100,000 workers worldwide.

It’s claimed that Halliburton has had the Salisbury plant for sale for the past year. Production of a compact pumping unit has already been transferred to Brazil. Dresser’s corporate headquarters is in Austin, Texas where another plant produces the electronic components of the gasoline pumps

The company is using 150 management personnel in an attempt to meet its production schedule, Hughes said.

He pointed out that Republican Party vice presidential candidate Richard Cheney was still Halliburton’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) when the dispute erupted. When Cheney stepped aside to become George W. Bush’s running mate, Halliburton gave him a $20 million retirement package plus stock options for his five years as CEO.

Dresser-Wayne’s resort to strikebreaking "is a clear indication that if they are elected they will dictate to the people rather than take the high road of working together for the good of America," Hughes told the World. "Both George W. Bush and Cheney are oil people and we know they are for big business."

Bush and Cheney are outspoken supporters of union-busting measures on the books in the Lone Star State. "Texas is a right-to-work state with low unionization of the work force," Bush recently bragged.

The company recently announced a deal to manufacture all service station pumps for Amoco-BP. The plant here is more than 100 years old, Hughes said, and has been unionized since 1943. Hughes has worked in the plant for 21 years.

Company president John Ryan, after taking charge of the Salisbury Dresser plant in February, spoke only of cost cutting to the union negotiating committee.

"I make the big bucks here," he told the negotiating committee, according to a member of UAW Local 354.

Ryan then proceeded to eliminate one of two assembly lines and initiate a program of job duplication and speed-up, assigning some workers responsibility for the operation of two machines rather than the one they’d been operating.

Dresser is threatening to lay off 100 to 150 workers after the strike.

The contract expired June 30 and the lack of good faith bargaining on the part of Dresser prompted the strike. Hughes charged that the company gave the union 20 pages of proposals to start the negotiations. Three of Dresser’s proposals have since been voted down by the rank and file.

"Here we are in a full economic recovery," said Harold Greenhouse, "and they expect us to take a pay cut while they give up nothing. We give that little extra on the job and then we get dumped on."

"They claim they don’t have the money to give us retirement," said striker Butch Banks, "but they give Cheney $20 million after only five years with the company and they waived his penalty for early retirement. It’s not right!"

Dresser took $2 million from the pension fund in 1988 when they took over Wayne Industries. They claimed the pension fund was "over-funded." Dresser also sold an employee parking lot, which now contains a strip mall and a grocery store.

Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense in President George Bush’s administration and was a chief strategist of the Persian Gulf War, was hired by Halliburton on the strength of his close ties to the Pentagon and to Persian Gulf oil sheiks. He is a walking, talking conflict of interest.

Cheney orchestrated Halliburton’s purchase of Dresser Industries, then the world’s largest manufacturer of oil field drilling equipment. Halliburton reported $17.4 billion in annual revenues in 1998, much of it for equipment sold to Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Nigeria and other oil-rich nations.

Cheney also secured $2.3 billion in U.S. Army contracts for Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, for engineering work in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and Haiti. He arranged $489 million in Export-Import Bank credits to the gangster-ridden Russian oil giant, Tyumen, which controls an ocean of Siberian oil.

An investigative report by the on-line publication, "Private I" predicts that if Bush-Cheney are elected "the company’s government contracts would obviously go through the roof."

Workers on the picket line voiced anger at Halliburton’s $20 million "golden parachute" for Cheney. "They’re not worth that," said Greenhouse, as he walked the picket line. "They do nothing to make it ... When they take their big bonus, they’re taking it from us."

Quality has plummeted since the strike began, according to picketers, and orders have been canceled. "The replacement workers received an $850 bonus. For what?" Banks asked. "That’s more than we’ve received in the last two years!"

Tim Wheeler contributed to this article.