Santa Clarita Construction Workers Protest Wages

Carrying signs calling for higher wages, non-union construction workers Friday picketed a Santa Clarita job site in a labor action that has slowed down residential building throughout Southern California.

The men, who put up plasterboard known as drywall, say they are among the majority of the region’s 4,000 drywallers--most of whom are not unionized--who have walked off the job since the labor action began June 1 in Orange County.

“They haven’t stopped the work, but they have slowed things down,” said Ken Willis, executive director of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, which represents 2,000 companies in the five-county region covering Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The drywallers earn about four to six cents per square foot, or $200 to $300 a week, for hanging 100-pound sheets of drywall, which form the inner walls of housing units. They want eight cents a square foot--the same rate that they say they were paid in the early 1980s. To get higher wages, they are trying to form or join a union and then intend to get builders to sign a contract with them that would guarantee higher wages and medical benefits.

“We’re not asking for that much, just enough to feed our families,” said George Rios, a Santa Ana resident who marched in Santa Clarita on Friday.

Rios was one of about 50 men who picketed a 158-unit apartment complex under construction in the 23000 block of San Fernando Road in the Newhall section of Santa Clarita. Many of the picketers live in Orange County but work in Santa Clarita and throughout Southern California. Some had walked off the job at the apartment complex earlier this week.

Dan Chandler of Burbank-based Chandler Group, which is building the apartment complex, declined to comment Friday on the effect of the walkout.

Two private guards were posted in front of the complex, a security measure many builders have taken since the walkout began, Willis said.

The Building Industry Assn. refuses to negotiate with the drywallers, Willis said. The sluggish economy has hit the construction industry particularly hard, making it difficult for builders to pay higher wages, he said. In 1991, 34,000 housing units were built in Southern California, compared to 134,000 in 1986, he said.

“Right now, builders just don’t think they can fool with this,” Willis said. “This is like catching the flu, anyway. We’ll get over it.”

But the picketers said they have planned the walkout since last fall and are prepared to stick it out until the building industry capitulates.

As the men, mostly Latinos, marched in Santa Clarita, a primarily white, conservative area, one passing motorist yelled a racial slur and another stopped to question the right of “foreigners” to improve their working conditions. Rios said most of the men are naturalized citizens who earned their citizenship under the amnesty program.

“No matter what, we still shouldn’t have to work nearly for free,” said one man, whose sign read: “We are humans, not burros.”