Drywallers File Complaints on Home Builders : Labor: Strikers also name drywall companies as they take their grievances to the NLRB and Department of Labor and will sue for unpaid overtime, their lawyers say.
Southern California drywall workers, who walked off the job nearly two months ago demanding a union, are trying a new tactic against the building industry: They’re asking the federal government to step in.
Their lawyers said they filed complaints Tuesday with the National Labor Relations Board and the federal Department of Labor against home builders and drywall concerns. The lawyers also said the strikers plan to sue drywall companies for unpaid overtime.
The men want higher wages than the $300 a week they say they average now for nailing plasterboard onto wooden frames to make the inner walls of houses. Wages in the industry haven’t risen since home builders broke the drywallers’ union 10 years ago with the help of men like today’s strikers, most of whom are Mexican immigrants.
The strikers complained Tuesday to the federal labor board that seven builders and drywall companies had obtained court orders against them that are “unconstitutional” and “unduly oppressive.”
In what the strikers say is the most egregious case, Irvine’s Woodcrest Development Inc. got a restraining order preventing picketing between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. at its Vista del Este subdivision in Corona. That means picketers can’t speak with non-striking drywall workers as they arrive and leave work, the strikers say.
The restraining order, the strikers’ lawyers say in a press release, simply names John “Does 1-1,000.” It is so broad, they say, that “‘any person’ whatsoever who is personally handed a copy of the order, including uninvolved bystanders, is transformed into one of the defendant ‘Does’ and made subject to its restrictions.”
“The industry’s behavior has been outrageous,” said Robert A. Cantore, a Los Angeles lawyer representing the strikers. “These men have a right to picket.”
The restraining order is only one example of how Southern California’s establishment is coming down on them, the strikers say, by siding with the powerful home builders.
Several dozen strikers, in fact, picketed L.A. police headquarters Tuesday, saying that some of them were manhandled during a clash with police last week on the Hollywood Freeway at which 63 were arrested.
More recently, four drywallers were reportedly arrested Tuesday near San Diego on charges of vandalizing a subdivision. The biggest mass bust, though, came early this month in Mission Viejo when 153 men were charged with felony conspiracy to kidnap after taking six drywall workers from a construction site. Charges were later dropped against nearly half of the men, and most of the rest pleaded guilty to a minor charge.
Woodcrest officials had no comment on the complaint to the labor board, which they said they had not yet seen. The builders trade group says its members got the restraining orders to prevent violence. Police and builders have reported sporadic incidents of rock-throwing, window-breaking, threats and acts of civil disobedience by more than 100 strikers at a time all over Southern California since shortly after the men walked out June 1.
“We wouldn’t have asked for temporary restraining orders if there hadn’t been violence,” said O. Randolph Hall Jr., a San Bernardino home builder and president of the trade group Building Industry Assn. of Southern California. “Nor would a judge have granted us one.”
Another builder, Kathryn G. Thompson Development Co. in Aliso Viejo, is also named in the complaint. That company got a restraining order after videotaping men said to be strikers breaking windows at one of its construction sites.
“I don’t know why we’re named,” said Michael J. Rafferty, president of the company. “We don’t even hire these men. It’s the drywall companies who hire them.”
The others named in the complaint to the labor board are two drywall companies, Rick Rogers Drywall Inc. in Redlands and Reliable Interiors in Corona; and home builders Kaufman & Broad, a huge Los Angeles-based builder; Hunt Enterprises of Anaheim; and Mesa Homes of Temecula.
The strikers have also asked the U. S. Department of Labor to investigate what they say is the widespread practice by drywall subcontractors of not paying overtime.
Federal law requires time-and-a-half pay for anything over 40 hours a week. The drywall workers say they routinely work 60 hours. The men allege through their lawyers that the practice is industrywide; in other words, no drywall companies pay overtime.
There are as many as 6,000 drywall hangers in Southern California, their lawyers allege, and each could be owed as much as $7,500 over the past three years covered by federal law, or a total $45 million in unpaid overtime.
The group also plans to sue soon in federal court over the overtime issue, the lawyers said, adding that they will try to put a lien on every house built by men who should have been paid overtime.
The industry has long come under attack for averting tax obligations by paying employees in cash. The latest allegation didn’t get an outright denial from the industry’s trade group, the Pacific Rim Drywall Assn.
“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t pay overtime, but then again it’s not something they’d be likely to talk about,” said Bob Sato, a Ventura County drywall executive and president of the group. “So I don’t know how widespread the practice might be.”
Another issue that came up Tuesday involved the strikers’ Los Angeles law firm, Gilbert & Sackman.
The builders have suggested in their own complaints to the federal labor board that the local carpenters union is behind the walkout.
If the builders could establish a connection--that, say, the carpenters were paying the law firm--they could obtain restraining orders and file lawsuits against the union, too.
The union, however, says it has done nothing but lend the striking men a couple of union halls in which to meet.
And Cantore, the lawyer from Gilbert & Sackman, said the firm is not being paid by the carpenters union.
Instead, he said, two activist groups will try to collect money to pay the legal bills: The California Immigrant Workers’ Assn., which Cantore says is rounding up donations from labor unions and others; and the Latino group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional.
