I would like to dispute some of the statements made by Dave Dorko, plant manager at Indspec Chemical Corp. in Petrolia, that were printed March 23 in the Butler Eagle's Business Portfolio section.

First of all, we were never acquired by Indspec in 1988; we were bought by Frank Spingola from Beazer Corp., who overtook the company through the stock market.

Spingola treated us like human beings, not in an atmosphere of corporate greed such as Occidental Petroleum Corp. has put upon us since we became affiliated with them.

We made millions of dollars for Spingola, and in return he gave us stock and profit-sharing checks that showed the appreciation we deserved for being the best producer of resorcinol in the world.

Unfortunately for us, due to a family crisis, Spingola sold the plant to Occidental Petroleum. Since Occidental has taken over, it has done nothing but reap the profits, run the plant into the ground, break up the union members, and replace the upper management with its own people.

We work in a very dangerous chemical plant, handling some of the most cancer-causing chemicals in the world. Dorko forgot to give some of those statistics.

Most of the people who retire from Indspec die of cancer, if they live long enough to reach retirement age. Many have died at a very young age.

I can see why Dorko would put his own version - what I regard as propaganda - in the newspaper about energy prices, medical insurance and pension payouts. For what Indspec achieved by rewriting the contract in April 2002, Dorko must be trying to put ideas in people's heads for the upcoming contract in April 2005.

In our pension plan, we are currently under the national average of chemical workers of America by $15 per each year of service. We are very underpaid compared with the hazards we must deal with on a daily basis.

Occidental sent in its people from Texas months before the previous contract expired in 2002. Since their job was to do something, they came up with the idea, with some help from some of the foremen looking for a feather in their hat, that they could run the high-maintenance plant with 40 fewer employees.

These employees were the most-skilled maintenance people in the plant.

So, those employees were given an incentive package to leave. Since then, the plant has gone nowhere but downhill.

There is no other plant in the world producing resorcinol, except ours and one plant in Japan, that can make the quality of resorcinol that we can. In April 2002, we had about 9 million pounds of resorcinol in stock.

Anticipating a strike vote, the company prepared itself well. Since then, the former plant management has been replaced by Dorko and his followers, and now we have no resorcinol in stock and a plant that looks like a junkyard.

If the company must cut costs, it should have the backbone to ask for some of the $25 million bonus that Ray Irani, Occidental chief executive officer, got in 2003.

The history of the Indspec plant in the community, to which Dorko alluded in the March 23 article, must include that no one from Petrolia Valley has been hired there in, say, 15 to 20 years.