Drywallers Walk Out in Southland : Labor: Hundreds in predominantly Latino work force shut down jobs at housing tracts. They want a union and improved pay and benefits.

Hundreds of men who put drywall in new homes all over Southern California have walked off the job, shutting down work at housing tracts from Los Angeles to the Mexican border.

The men, most of them Latinos, say they are paid less now than 10 years ago, before home builders and their subcontractors broke the union during the last recession. Since then, the labor force for the Southern California drywall business has become overwhelmingly Latino.

The workers want a union and a contract that binds the drywall companies to pay health benefits and wages higher than the $200 a week that the men say they average now.

The drywallers have already been out of work since June 1 and have been picketing job sites sporadically every day since then. There are 7,000 to 8,000 drywall workers in Southern California, the strikers say; in some places, they say, they have as many as three-fourths of the trade in their camp.

Meanwhile, a meeting has been scheduled Thursday between strike leaders and up to 30 drywall subcontractors.

This is the third time in the past 10 years that the drywallers have walked off their jobs. But this time, they say, they are determined to stick it out until they get a union.

They are meeting at carpenters union halls in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. Other than the loan of the halls, they say, they’re on their own.

One reason they’re better organized this time around is many of the men come from the same village in central Mexico, El Maguey. Many of them are also related.

Those men say they have been planning this walkout since last fall and had urged their fellow workers to save enough to see them through.

“Everybody, even people in the lowest-paid factories, got at least a 50-cent raise over the last 10 years,” complained Roy Navarro of Fullerton, a drywaller with two children. “We can’t even afford to take our children to the hospital. We have to go to the cheapest clinics and wait three or four hours, and I still have to pay $100 I can’t afford.

“We’re not lazy people,” said Navarro, who was attending a meeting of 200 drywallers in an Orange union hall Monday afternoon. “What we’re asking for is only reasonable: to make a wage we can live on.”

Jose Vasquez of Fullerton, a drywaller for seven years, said: “People think construction workers make a lot of money. But we can’t afford to buy the houses we build.”

The drywall subcontractors, meanwhile, say they’re caught between their workers and home-building companies that insist that they hold their costs down in a bad market. The subcontractors have to win work by putting in the lowest bid to install drywall for home builders.

Drywall, or plasterboard, forms the inner walls of houses. It comes in panels that weigh more than 100 pounds each and has to be manhandled into place, nailed down, then smoothed over.

“Hanging” drywall is said to be one of the hardest jobs in construction. The drywall companies now pay a piece rate of 4 cents to 6 cents per square foot. In the mid-1980s, the drywall workers say, they were paid 8 cents to 9 cents per square foot--and that’s all they’re asking for now.

“Everyone agrees the men in the field should be earning more,” said Kathy Davidson, administrator at Nuwalco Inc. in Upland, San Bernardino County, one of the larger drywall companies. “But as long as one subcontractor underbids us, we all have to bid low to get the work.”

Just 20 of Nuwalco’s 60 drywallers have been showing up for work. The other 40 are picketing and persuading other Latino drywallers to leave their jobs. As a result, all of Nuwalco’s six jobs are shut down.

The story is much the same at Champion Drywall in Anaheim, another big drywaller. Just one job out of six is operating, and just 25 of 100 men are showing up for work.

“They’re strong, there’s no doubt about it,” President Paul Diguiseppi said of the striking workers. Strikers have threatened some of his men, he added.

The leaders of the drywallers have stressed nonviolence in their daily meetings with the strikers. Some supporters acknowledge, though, that men who have crossed picket lines have had their car tires slashed. The drywallers’ tactic, a supporter said, is to walk onto a construction site, pick up the tools of a man who is working, wash them and hand them back to him. The message, the supporter said, is clear.

The big drywall companies met last week and decided to assign all of their workers to one job at a time so that the men wouldn’t be intimidated. That has worked but has caused a slowdown for the home builders.

“The longer it stays slow, the more work will back up,” said H. Lawrence Webb, president of the Southern California region of A-M Homes. “The implications of this if it continues are very worrisome.”

A-M, based in Santa Barbara, has just two projects at which houses are being drywalled, Webb said; at both of them, work is going slower than usual.

At least one tract has been picketed at Aliso Viejo’s Kathryn Thompson Development Co. Like other home builders, the company’s president, Michael Rafferty, said the subcontractors have to solve their own problems.

“This is a bad time for a slowdown, considering how bad times in the industry are,” he said. “We just hope they can resolve it soon.”

The strikers say they want a union and a contract. The last time they walked out, they say, the drywall companies raised piece rates and got everyone back to work. Then they lowered them again.

“They’re already trying to intimidate us,” said drywaller Nicolas Munoz of Fullerton. “This is the only way to get some respect from them.”

The strikers also say the industry doesn’t want a union. The reason, they say, is because home builders would have to open their books, and state and federal regulators might not like what they see.

Not only are they regularly paid late or not at all, the men say, they’re also often paid in cash through labor brokers, which they say raises their suspicions that their income taxes aren’t being paid.

Three years ago, the state Employment Development Department tax enforcement section and the Internal Revenue Service started investigating Southern California’s drywall business.

The regulators nailed some companies but didn’t find evidence of widespread wrongdoing.

The home-building industry in Southern California was once heavily unionized; since the 1982 recession, however, the unions have lost nearly all of their members in that industry.