Drywaller Held After Freeway Confrontation

Striking drywall workers threw rocks at replacement workers on a freeway early Friday morning, then staged sporadic demonstrations outside a construction site in Anaheim Hills, authorities said.

One man was arrested during the morning confrontation, and another suffered minor head injuries.

Police said that the freeway attack was planned as part of the drywall hangers’ wildcat strike, which began June 1 and has led to demonstrations at construction sites from Ventura County to the Mexican border.

But the striking workers said Friday that they were only on their way to President Bush’s speech in Riverside when they saw replacement workers at a weigh station and stopped to talk with them about the need for a union.

According to California Highway Patrol officer Mike Lundquist, about 30 workers from the San Dimas-based Gateway Drywall Co. were riding east in a long-bed truck on the Riverside Freeway just after 6:30 a.m. when four or five pickup trucks filled with strikers pulled up alongside them and began throwing rocks and bottles.

Gateway supervisor Wayne Eddy, who was driving behind his workers, told police that his employees pulled off at a weigh station near Weir Canyon Road to escape the attack. But the strikers’ vehicles pulled over to the right shoulder, and soon there were about 150 men facing off on the side of the freeway, Lundquist said.

“All of a sudden, there was a large number of people running toward the truck,” said CHP Officer Larry Augustyniak, who was at his post in the weigh station when the confrontation broke out. The strikers, who had picket signs carrying messages for President Bush in their truck, were yelling at the replacement workers, Augustyniak said.

About 30 police officers, including CHP, sheriff’s deputies and others from Anaheim and Brea, quickly ended the confrontation, sending the strikers back to their vehicles.

Lundquist said traffic was backed up about 1 1/2 miles and the confrontation slowed the eastbound lanes for more than two hours.

Police charged Gabriel Acosta, 36, a striker from Paramount, with failing to obey authorities and for loitering on the freeway, Lundquist said. One truck with about 17 strikers was detained for an hour, but police did not find enough evidence to make arrests, Anaheim Sgt. Richard Buchholz said.

Spokesmen for the strikers denied that they were chasing the replacement workers, and said the men were en route to protest outside Bush’s speech when the trucks met on the freeway. They denied that the strikers threw rocks, and said replacement workers had instigated the violence.

“They saw all these people in these trucks, they thought they could talk to them about joining the strike,” said Roy Navarro, who later spoke Friday at a union hall in Orange where the drywall workers have been meeting. “We don’t want to see them (replacement workers) on the freeway. We’d rather see them staying home.

“They’re just hurting themselves,” he said about the replacement workers. “If we all decide to go to work tomorrow, things will be worse for everyone.”

The strikers include about a quarter of Southern California’s 4,000 drywall hangers. The group is trying to form a union, but area drywall companies say that if they give in, housing developers would turn to cheaper, non-union labor and drive union subcontractors out of business. The drywall workers, who have complained about not receiving a pay raise in a decade, say their pay averages about $300 a week.

Sixty-eight drywall workers were arrested a week ago when a demonstration spilled over onto the Hollywood Freeway. Earlier this month, 149 drywall hangers were charged with trespassing and conspiring to kidnap workers at a Mission Viejo construction site. Officials identified many of those arrested in Orange County as illegal immigrants and deported about two dozen of the workers to Mexico.

Several hours after Friday morning’s freeway altercation, Anaheim police returned to the area, chasing strikers away from a housing tract under construction at the corner of Oak Canyon Drive and Flintridge Way.

A witness, who asked not to be identified, said as many as 200 strikers had been driving past the site on three different occasions Friday morning. Just after noon, the witness said, four pickup trucks drove directly toward the site, and one of the trucks nicked the entrance gate. No arrests resulted from those actions.

Times staff writer Michael Flagg contributed to this report.