Violence, Vandalism Rise in Drywaller Strike : Walkout: Workers trash half-built houses in tracts in Orange and San Bernardino counties and punch laborers and foremen there and in San Diego County. They want a union and more pay.

Reports of vandalism and violence increased this week across Southern California as a walkout by drywallers moved through its fourth week.

Builders and police say the drywallers have trashed half-built houses in several tracts in Orange and San Bernardino counties and punched a couple of workers and foremen in San Diego, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

A few arrests have been made. But in at least one case, in San Bernardino County, the Sheriff’s Department said two drywallers were released from jail after several days when nobody could be found to sign a complaint against them for allegedly stealing tools from a job site.

In the city of Riverside, three workers were pelted with rocks and boards Tuesday at a construction site. They were treated at a hospital and released. No arrests have been made; an investigation continues.

The drywallers, who are not unionized, say they want a union and higher wages than the $300 a week that most of them now earn.

At daily meetings of the workers, whose savings are dwindling, strike leaders openly discourage violence, but sometimes there is an unspoken acknowledgment that vandalism pressures the subcontractors to end the dispute.

On the other hand, such tactics may cost the strikers the support of the Mexican-American community, which has been donating food and money to the men and their families.

In the 1970s, when the drywall business was unionized, most of the workers were non-Latino. Now, the labor force is overwhelmingly Mexican.

Msgr. Jaime Soto, the highest-ranking Latino Roman Catholic priest in Orange County, has attended several strike meetings to urge nonviolence. “These men are trying to improve the lot of themselves and their families,” he said. “But the violence makes it very difficult for myself and other Hispanic leaders to continue to support them.”

Although drywall subcontractors in San Diego have agreed to raise wages, so far companies across the region have refused to sign a union contract. So the walkout has turned into a test of endurance between the workers, most of whom are young men who came the Southland to search for work, and the subcontractors, who broke the unions in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“It’s a question of who starves first,” said Joe Sayatovich of Sayatovich Drywall Interiors in Lakeside, one of San Diego County’s biggest drywall companies. “And it may take all summer to find out.”

Drywall is nailed to a house’s frame to form the inner walls. The job is hot, heavy and hard, requiring workers to lift 100-pound sheets of drywall into place.

The drywallers--there may be up to 4,000 of them in Southern California--have kept drywall from being nailed up at most job sites, thus slowing new-home construction in San Diego and Orange counties. And they have also curtailed building in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

They have been less effective in Los Angeles County, where they have not organized as well and where construction sites are typically surrounded by established neighborhoods and so are harder to spot.

Police across the region have begun tailing the drywallers, who are easy to spot because they usually travel in caravans of a half-dozen or more pickup trucks and cars. In such cities as Tustin, where up to several hundred drywallers have picketed construction sites, police in riot gear have mounted mammoth shows of force when pickets arrive and have routinely stopped their cars and trucks.

Tustin City Manager William A. Huston defended those practices as appropriate, given the reports of violence and vandalism elsewhere. So far, there have been no arrests or vandalism in Tustin.

In Aliso Viejo, one man was arrested earlier this week on suspicion of trespassing.

Despite the construction slowdown, little serious negotiation has occurred. The subcontractors’ small trade organization, the Pacific Rim Drywallers Assn., has had just one formal meeting with the leaders of the walkout. Most of those leaders come from a single village in Mexico, El Maguey, which accounts for their extraordinary unity.

One exception to the lack of talks was in San Diego this week, where workers rejected a 25% increase in wages because subcontractors said they would not sign a contract guaranteeing higher pay.

Without a contract to bind them, workers say, the subcontractors will lower wages after they have lured the drywallers back.

In a meeting of 500 drywallers Wednesday in San Diego, 183 voted to accept the subcontractors’ offer; the strikers said they stopped counting “nay” votes at 295.

Lakeside subcontractor Sayatovich said other drywallers favoring the proposal were not allowed to vote.

Not true, said Antonio Hernandez, a strike leader. “They pressured us to let them have a vote, and they lost,” he said. “Now they won’t talk to us.”

The San Diego subcontractors are dealing with striking drywallers on their own. Employers in the rest of the region are following the lead of the Pacific Rim Drywallers Assn., which is not talking to strikers and has not advanced any offers.

The reason: The group’s attorneys say that by talking to the strike leaders the subcontractors could be construed as having recognized the right of the men to collective bargaining.

“We haven’t closed the door entirely, but right now we’re at an impasse,” said Bob Sato, who owns a drywalling company called Tricon in the Ventura County town of Newbury Park and who is president of the trade group.

But it is not clear how long the drywall companies can hold out. Most home builders, Sato said, have been understanding, although some have tried to replace struck drywall companies with competitors.

If home builders want to, they can invoke clauses in their contracts allowing them to hire new drywalling companies and charge any overruns to the old subcontractor.

The new subcontractors have not had much success at finishing homes, either, Sato said.