Drywall Strikers Jailed En Masse in O.C. Standoff

After a tense, two-hour standoff, 149 angry drywall workers were arrested Thursday after police said they stormed a Mission Viejo construction site and took hostages.

The hostages were released unharmed, but the confrontation resulted in the first group arrest yet in the 5-week-old walkout by drywall installers, who are demanding a union and higher wages for installing plasterboard on the frames of new homes throughout Southern California.

All 149 workers were being held at the Central Men’s Jail in lieu of $50,000 bail each on charges of felony trespassing and conspiracy to kidnap. More beds were being moved into the jail to accommodate them.

Within hours of the arrests, wives of the drywall workers quickly assembled at the jail for a demonstration that included about 250 women, children and striking drywall hangers who were not arrested.

“My husband left this morning at 4 a.m. Then I heard from a friend that there had been some trouble, I believe in El Toro, and that they were arrested,” said Rosa Moran, whose husband, Rigoberto Guzman, 24, was among those arrested Thursday.

The men, who attach the material that forms the inside walls of houses, rushed the site just after 7 a.m., surprising workers at a Brighton Homes project near Oso Viejo and La Paz Road.

About 100 drywall hangers “just swooped in, knocked over a fence and grabbed a bunch of guys, threatening to kill their families if they didn’t come with them,” said a drywall foreman for Champion Drywall in Anaheim. About $3,000 worth of tools were also stolen, said the foreman, who asked not to be identified.

Sheriff’s deputies, who had been alerted, arrived as about 14 truckloads of striking drywall workers and their hostages were leaving the site and driving north on Olympiad Road, a sheriff’s spokesman said. The deputies followed for about a mile and a half before moving in to confront them.

“We were looking for somewhere to stop them and figured this was a good place,” said Sgt. Stan Jacquot, one of the first deputies on the scene. Officers were trying to avoid any confrontation on a busy street, he said.

Carrying signs, some of which read “No More Work Without Union,” “We Need Health Benefits” and “Police for Sale,” the drywall hangers piled out of their trucks and lined up as more carloads of deputies arrived.

The confrontation ended before 10 a.m. when the strikers agreed to surrender and be transported to jail.

In an operation that took several hours, the men were handcuffed by twos and searched on the street before being loaded on buses for their ride to the Orange County Jail.

The mass arrest was the largest in the county in recent memory, said Lt. Richard Olson. It was also the first group arrest in Southern California in the walkout.

Reinforcements were called in from all over the county, Olson said, resulting in the largest show of police force he has seen in nearly a decade.

“We pulled deputies off the street, investigators away from their desks, everyone we could spare,” Olson said.

The hostages initially refused to cooperate with police, Olson said. All will be interviewed again later, he said.

One of the drywall leaders, who would identify himself only as Roy, contended that no one was kidnaped. But he conceded that the situation did get out of control after several strikers got overzealous and confronted the working men.

“They said we robbed them, went on private property and kidnaped them,” he said. “Come on, more than 150 men did that? I don’t understand why they had to arrest most of the men when less than a handful were involved in this.”

One hostage complained of back pains and was transported to a hospital, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said. It was not clear, however, if the injury was a result of the incident, he said.

The workers, most of them Mexican immigrants, have been sneaking into housing tracts from Ventura County to the Mexican border trying to persuade other drywall workers to join them in the walkout, according to the drywall companies and some of the strikers themselves.

If that fails, they threaten the workers, the drywall companies say, adding that the strikers have also vandalized job sites by poking holes in the walls of half-finished houses and breaking an occasional window.

The men say they make only $300 for a 60-hour week, compared to $500 a week a few years ago when the housing industry was booming.

Some vandalism and violence is usual in lengthy strikes. But this walkout has included many more incidents of violence and vandalism than most in the region during the past 10 years, said Sgt. Steve Morgan of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

“This thing has been ebbing and flowing for weeks,” said Lt. Larry Abbott of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “The drywallers have been hitting and running all over, including two similar incidents” Wednesday.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was to screen those arrested Thursday. The INS routinely screens everyone booked at the Orange County Jail, the Sheriff’s Department said. Nevertheless, the procedure drew a protest from a local labor leader.

“It’s ridiculous that Immigration sat back for years and let the development community work these people for nothing wages, and now they’re going to act as strikebreakers for that same community,” said Mike Potts, executive secretary of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Orange County.

“I wonder, if these people turn out to be illegal immigrants, if Immigration is going to ask them who’s been employing them illegally.”

The drywall companies have adamantly refused to accede to the strikers’ demand for a union, saying that if they accept a union the home builders will turn to cheaper, non-union competitors and drive the unionized subcontractors out of business.

The two sides remained far apart Thursday, with neither expressing a willingness to compromise.

Police, meanwhile, say they’re caught in the middle. The strikers complain of being stopped arbitrarily and hassled by officers, especially in smaller cities such as Fontana and Tustin. Some builders and drywall companies, on the other hand, say that police haven’t been nearly aggressive enough in cracking down on trespassing and vandalism.

Some drywall subcontractors also point a finger at the region’s powerful home builders, who they say have squeezed the drywall companies as business dried up in the past three years.

“The violence has been reprehensible,” said Brian Maag, president of Orange County Drywall in Tustin, a medium-sized drywall company.

“But I understand why these guys are out on strike. I’m even sympathetic to a certain extent,” he said. “Wages aren’t what they should be. Even though we went along with it, it’s the builders who’ve pushed wages down.”

Times staff writer David Reyes contributed to this report.

BACKROUND

Hundreds of Southern California drywall installers walked off the job June 1 in a strike that is part of a drive to unionize their trade. Drywallers say that since their old union was broken in the last recession a decade ago, their wages and benefits have declined. The strike has escalated. Builders have reported that homes under construction have been damaged and police have investigated reports of violence. The walkout, the third in the past 10 years, has affected construction projects from Ventura to San Diego.