Drywall Strike Increasingly Bitter, Costly

Nearly 400 drywall installers and their families marched at the county courthouse Tuesday to dramatize their walkout against Southern California’s beleaguered building industry as the strike enters its second month.

Under a hot midday sun, shouts of “Si, Se Puede!”--”Yes, It Can Be Done!”--echoed off the towering building in Santa Ana as office workers and lawyers in pin-striped suits stared curiously.

Thirty days after it began, this strike by those who install sheets of drywall on the frames of new homes has grown increasingly visible, contentious and costly to all sides.

Last week, Tustin police decked in riot gear faced off with about 200 demonstrators carrying picket signs outside the Tustin Ranch development. There were other demonstrations in Orange County and reports of occasional violence in Riverside County.

The drywall installers--most of whom are Mexican immigrants--say they have not had a raise in 10 years and can’t support their families on the $300 they earn these days for working a 60-hour week.

Without even a union, the men--many of them from the same village in Central Mexico--began organizing the walkout last fall. So far they have shut down most drywall companies and slowed building at dozens of construction sites from Ventura County to the Mexican border.

“What you have done is, indeed, amazing,” said Msgr. Jaime Soto, the highest-ranking Latino priest in Orange County, speaking to the group Tuesday through a bullhorn.

“Your belief, your trust, your mutual respect, that is your power and your strength,” said Soto, vicar to the Latino community in the Diocese of Orange. Soto is one of the civic leaders and business people in the Latino community who have supported the strikers by rounding up donations of food.

The workers want not only higher wages but also health insurance--which most of them don’t now have--and a union contract to help enforce these demands. Without a union, the men say, the drywall companies will simply renege on any promises.

But the drywall companies’ trade organization, the Pacific Rim Drywallers Assn., which represents dozens of drywall concerns, has said its members refuse to deal with a union.

The companies fear that if their workers unionize, home builders will freeze them out by hiring cheaper competitors using non-union workers.

The two sides met once two weeks ago but no further talks have occurred except in San Diego, where they broke off last week after workers rejected an offer of a wage increase but without recognition of the union.

Wages in the drywall business began to drop dramatically two years ago when the housing market went sour. Builders have turned out far fewer homes than the hundreds at a time they produced before the recession began, and so, some drywall workers say, builders have begun to squeeze their subcontractors.

“Everybody’s spending more to bring a house to market, because you have to spread your overhead over a smaller number of houses,” said real estate consultant Matt Disston of Research Network in Laguna Hills. “So nobody’s making much money.”

That may be true, said Antonio Hernandez, a strike leader from San Diego, but the workers have been on the short end of the stick for some time: Home prices in some places have gone up several hundred thousand dollars in the last 10 years, while wages for those who build the houses haven’t gone up at all.

“Who’s putting that extra money in their pockets?” he asked. “Not us.”

In places where drywall hangers are still working, some strikers have knocked holes in sheets of drywall and reportedly punched a foreman occasionally.

Police and sheriff’s departments around the region last week began stationing patrol cars at job sites. They have also been following the strikers’ car caravans and making random stops. The strikers complain they’re being unnecessarily hassled.

No serious injuries have been confirmed and only a handful of arrests have been reported around Southern California. Some vandalism and violence is usual in most strikes, especially in the building trades.

But rumors of far worse violence spread around the region last week, adding to the tensions among builders, strikers and police. In one instance, a Building Industry Assn. chapter in Rancho Cucamonga held a press conference featuring a man who had been shot in the stomach, purportedly by strikers.

But a lieutenant in the Moreno Valley branch of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said that the man could not be sure that strikers had shot him.

“He made it sound like it was in direct relation to the labor dispute at the press conference,” said Lt. Greg Corrigan, who attended the event. “But he’d told us earlier on the police report that it was an irate motorist who’d shot him.”

Home builders are said to be concerned that once a group such as the Carpenters Union--which has lent the strikers its union halls--gets a foothold again in the home-building industry, it will use that wedge to organize other trades whose unions were also broken years ago.

The home builders and their subcontractors got rid of the drywall unions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recruiting for lower wages the Mexican drywall hangers who are now on strike. Those who work on commercial buildings, such as office towers and shopping centers, are still unionized, although the unions’ control is eroding there, too.

After the unions were broken, some drywall companies began using notorious Mexican “labor barons” to provide workers to the drywall companies, especially outside Los Angeles County.

The barons often cheated the men by paying them in cash; they also cheated the government by not paying the men’s income taxes, Social Security withholding or workers compensation payments, according to government officials, drywall companies and the workers themselves.

“Basically what we have to ask is how long the wealthy interests such as the home builders are going to sit by and let you and I subsidize their workers’ health care in the form of Medi-Cal and other government health programs,” said Mike Potts, executive secretary of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Orange County.

Some drywall companies accuse the carpenters union of secretly being behind this walkout but keeping a low profile to avoid legal problems with the drywall companies. The union denies it.

Home builders, meanwhile, say they haven’t been crippled by this job action. Most still have finished but unsold houses to offer buyers. But every day the walkout continues it costs the builders in interest on their construction loans and costs the subcontractors in missed payments.

The builders--recognizing the emotional public appeal of the poorly-paid drywall workers--have generally tried to keep a low profile in the dispute.

One who is willing to talk is Larry Webb, president of A-M Homes’ Southern California division, who said his company has had “slowdowns just like everybody else.” But that A-M is hurt less, he said, because it has fewer houses in the drywall stage.

A prolonged strike, however, could threaten new projects and mean delays for buyers hoping to move into new houses, he said.

“Any way you cut it, it’s going to affect everyone,” Webb said.

“My wish is that they sit down and start talking right away, because the longer the strike goes on, the greater the potential for violence.”

At the march Tuesday, several men carried a 12-foot sheet of drywall. On it they had written by hand: “We Don’t Want: Low Wages; Cash Payments; To Cheat the Government; Uninsured Families; To Depend on Medi-Cal; To Live on Welfare; Dishonest Foreman; To Burden California; Violence;” and finally, “This System to Continue.”

Times staff writer James M. Gomez contributed to this report.