WHEATLAND TUBE Strikers travel to main office in Jersey

The informational picketing was to begin at noon and last several hours.
WHEATLAND, Pa. -- Striking Steelworkers at Wheatland Tube Co. are taking their picket line all the way to the company's headquarters in New Jersey.
About 50 members of Local 1660 of the United Steelworkers of America climbed aboard a bus in the Sharon City Center parking lot at 5 a.m. today for the trip to the company's national headquarters in Collingswood, N.J.
The plan was to set up an informational picket line around the building starting around noon and to maintain that line for several hours before returning to Mercer County tonight, said Dom Vadala, chief negotiator for the union.
The effort is designed to draw headquarters' attention to the strike that started at the tube plant here April 28, he said.
The 470 members of Local 1660 walked off the job with the expiration of their old contract, and numerous bargaining sessions since then have failed to produce a new agreement.
The company's insistence that workers begin picking up a percentage share of their health insurance premiums has been the main stumbling block to a settlement.
Tensions
The strike heated up last week when the company resumed some production using foremen to run equipment and began shipping truckloads of finished pipe out of the plant.
The move angered pickets who, although they vented their anger at the passing trucks, didn't stop any shipments. There also were no reports of objects' being thrown at the vehicles.
The increased tension prompted the company to ask Mercer County common pleas court for an injunction to limit the total number of pickets at the plant to just 10, but a compromise worked out between the company and the union and signed by a judge allows 27 strikers to be at three locations around the plant at any time.