Southland Is Hooked on Cheap Immigrant Labor : Employment: With thousands of these workers competing for few jobs available to them, wages haven’t risen as fast as they otherwise would have.

Imagine for an instant that every Mexican immigrant in Orange County vanished one day.

Half-finished housing tracts would stand silent; hotels would have to turn away tourists; dirty dishes would pile up in hundreds of restaurant kitchens; there would be nobody behind the counter at dozens of fast-food joints; assembly lines would clank to a stop.

For better and worse, the county--and the rest of Southern California--is hooked on a fix of cheap immigrant labor.

What that means is that a blouse, or a hamburger at Carl’s Jr., costs Southern Californians less than it might otherwise. But it also means there are so many immigrants competing for so many jobs that wages in entire industries have been held down for years.

Consider, as a prime example, the drywall business. The Mexican immigrants who hang drywall in new homes didn’t see a raise through most of the 1980s. Then, when the real estate business ran up against the recession a couple of years ago, pay dropped by what the workers say was as much as several hundred dollars a week.

They responded with an unusual strike, organized by the workers themselves, without much union help, that has now gone on for three months. It has become the largest organizing drive in the nation, according to local AFL-CIO officials. Workers estimate that there are 4,000 drywall hangers in Southern California.

It’s not surprising these workers would rebel against low wages, for they are a more skilled, better-paid elite among first-generation immigrants, many of whom wind up washing dishes or working fast food for the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour.

By contrast, some drywall hangers say they have made as much as $700 and $800 a week when times were good, buying houses, new cars and perhaps putting a child through college.

Whether the strike succeeds is another matter: Based on the size of the crowds at rallies around Southern California, 1,000 workers at most seem to have been actively on strike. The workers say several thousand more drywall hangers support them but are sitting out the strike out of fear of police and their employers.

The contractors dispute that number. But both sides say the strike lost steam recently when some strikers went back to work as the end of August rolled around and rent and bills came due.

With contributions of food and money from unions and community groups, the strikers say they can easily hold out three more months. The contractors say they have been able to hang drywall easily since the first few weeks of the strike, when the strikers nearly shut the drywall business down.

The region’s dependence on cheap labor can be seen in the changes that have transformed the drywall industry: In a scant 10 years in Southern California, nearly all the jobs in the business--once predominantly white--have been taken by Mexican immigrants.

Some of the whites moved into drywall work at commercial structures like office buildings, but many got out of the business, say people familiar with the industry.

The dependence on cheap labor shows in little things.

Betty Miller, for example, recruits Orange County high school students for summer jobs. It’s not, she says, an easy sell these days because fast-food jobs just aren’t glamorous.

“We get lots of kids,” says Miller, who works for the state Employment Development Department’s summer youth program, “who say ‘I’ll work anywhere but fast food.’ Middle-class kids would rather work behind the perfume counter at Robinson’s or sell Bongo jeans at a Wet Seal boutique.”

It’s an attitude you don’t find nearly as much in small towns or in places in the American hinterland where there’s not much immigration. But in Southern California, without immigrant labor, the fast-food companies say they would have a big problem finding enough help.

There’s the Carl’s Jr. hamburger chain, for instance, with 637 restaurants throughout California and the rest of the Southwest. Only 15% of the help, says spokesman Patty Parks, is high school students. Many of the rest are Latino, and enough of those are first-generation Mexican immigrants that Carl’s arranges for volunteers to teach “restaurant English” to its employees.

There are drawbacks to all this, though. Thousands of people in Orange County elbowing their way into the same few jobs available to immigrants--busboy, farm worker, seamstress, assembly-line worker--means that wages haven’t grown in those businesses as fast as they otherwise would have.

In fact, real wages--factoring out inflation over time--have declined in Orange County’s factories since the early 1970s. Much of that drop is attributable to immigrants competing for jobs, says UCLA geography professor Allen J. Scott.

Scott has written a book that is, in part, about Orange County as the prototype of the city of the future. And the future, he says, isn’t all rosy: An economy with one leg based on unskilled, low-wage workers is going to have a tougher time making highly profitable but complicated, high-technology products like communications equipment for a global market.

“This undercuts our competitive advantage against countries with more skilled, more educated workers, like Germany and Japan,” Scott said.

More poor people mean an increasing burden on local social services like welfare. And then there is the argument that immigrants take jobs from U.S. citizens, although it seems unlikely many citizens would want the hard, low-paying jobs most immigrants do.

In the drywall industry, the builders and subcontractors used Mexican immigrants during the 1982 recession to break the carpenters union and displace highly paid, unionized white workers.

The money looked good to men who had been making a few dollars a day in Mexico. But there was never a raise, there were no benefits such as health insurance for the men and their families; and then wages began to sink with the recession.

Sixto Espana, 47, made $630 a week way back in 1974 when he started as a union drywall hanger. By the time he finally walked off his job a week ago, he was having trouble making $500 for a 60-hour week. There are no health benefits or vacations for drywall workers.

“And this with my experience,” he said, shaking his head.

An economy based on cheap labor isn’t all bad, either. For one thing, it’s a sure sign the economy’s still fairly robust. Says Raul Hinojosa, who teaches urban planning at UCLA: “Immigrating is a rational act. People don’t come to a place where they know they’re not going to get a job.”

The low-paying garment-manufacturing industry, in fact, is the fastest-growing manufacturing business in California, says Hinojosa, who has just finished a report about immigration for the state Legislature.

The tens of thousands of newcomers in turn stimulate more growth--more people buying food, renting apartments and shopping for clothes.

Low wages also mean cheaper goods and services, which make Southern California more competitive--if that’s the way you want to compete.

People like Nativo V. Lopez say it is not: “The California economy grows on the backs of exploited immigrant workers,” he declares.

Lopez is national co-director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino activist group. He can cite a litany of abuses against Mexican immigrants, especially the hundreds of thousands of illegal ones who are especially prone to exploitation because they usually fear to speak out.

And yet still they come.

In Orange County alone, the latest figures show 44,000 Mexican citizens either immigrated legally or--since many of those thousands were already here illegally--applied for amnesty under federal immigration law in 1990. The number of illegal immigrants who crossed the Mexican border bound for Orange County may have been as large, experts say.

The year before, it was 20,000. Times may be bad here, in the midst of a recession, but they’re even worse in Mexico.

Twenty years ago, people of Mexican descent working in Orange County were one of every 10 people with jobs. Now they are one in five--270,000 out of 1.3 million workers.

The impact has been even greater in certain businesses because first-generation Mexican immigrants in particular tend to congregate in the handful of unskilled, low-paying jobs available to them: the hotel business, where nearly all the maids and dishwashers are Latino; restaurants; the garment industry; and, of course, some of the construction trades, say labor experts.

What has happened in construction, in fact, is nothing short of amazing. In just the last decade, construction has become one of the 10 largest employers of Latinos in Southern California, measured by the percentage of the Latino population the building industry employs--7%, contrasted with 5% for the population at large.

Now the drywall strike is changing the way people think about these Mexican immigrants. For one, the drywall hangers--perhaps as many as one-fourth of them illegal immigrants--organized it themselves. The carpenters’ union, which has let the drywall workers’ use their hall, otherwise has kept a low profile to avoid being hauled into court by the contractors.

The strike also heartens unions anxious to corral all these new Mexican workers, who are one of the fastest-growing groups in the labor force. If the strike succeeds, it may begin to reverse a 10-year trend of shedding unions in the construction industry.

Finally, says Lopez of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, “these men have shattered the myth that the undocumented immigrant doesn’t want to organize.”