Drywall Strikers Make Major Breakthrough : Labor: After months of picketing, lawsuits and vandalism, subcontractors will meet on whether to let their employees unionize.

Is the drywall strike that has slowed home building across Southern California near an end?

Drywall subcontractors are to meet Thursday on whether to let employees have a union--a major breakthrough for the strikers. Until recently, most subcontractors had bitterly opposed a union. But after three months of fighting pickets, construction-site vandalism and lawsuits, some subcontractors now favor settling the strike.

The strikers, most of them Mexican immigrants, walked off the job June 1 demanding a union after subcontractors cut their wages during the recession. With 4,000 jobs at stake, the organizing drive is the largest--and one of the most unusual--in the nation, for the strikers say they have organized it with little outside help.

Drywallers install the plasterboard that forms the inner walls of buildings. The job is a physically demanding one that leaves some workers with joint ailments by middle age.

Few subcontractors would return phone calls to talk about the meeting, and none of those contacted would allow their names to be used. But clearly the strikers have forced the subcontractors at least to consider negotiating with the carpenters union, something many vowed at the strike’s beginning that they would never do.

Few subcontractors expected the strike to last out the summer. But contributions of food and money from other unions kept afloat the 1,000 or so strikers across Southern California.

Several times the strike seemed likely to peter out while the subcontractors and home builders remained staunchly opposed. Now, however, the mood is jubilant at the Carpenters District Council of Orange County hall in Orange, where the strikers meet every weekday.

“They’ve agreed to consider a union, is what I’m hearing,” said Michael Olds, a business agent at the carpenters union. “We’re very optimistic we’ll be contacted.”

Said Jesus Gomez, a strike leader: “I believe they’re trying to get everyone together and work this thing out. And they’ve got a lot of companies with them.”

Many strikers say a rash of lawsuits they filed forced the subcontractors to consider negotiating. (In August, the strikers’ lawyers began peppering the subcontractors with suits accusing them of not paying overtime and demanding back wages.)

But subcontractors say the legal cost of defending themselves in court was not the only factor that has made some of them anxious to end the strike: There has also been the expense of hiring security guards and erecting fences to protect housing tracts from vandalism by strikers.

And, with their work sites surrounded by picket lines, many subcontractors could not get drywall up quickly, and some could not finish the jobs at all.

Some of the subcontractors concede that their workers deserve a raise, but they say they are squeezed by home builders to hold their prices down.

“The legal expense was a factor,” one subcontractor said, “but it was really all these things.”

If they decide to negotiate, the subcontractors would probably do so as a group; none wants to sign a union contract while the competition remains non-union and able to charge lower prices.

The strikers are demanding that the industry raise wages, which were cut from an average of $500 a week to about $300 after the recession hit in 1990. And they want a union to hold the companies to any promises they make regarding wages.

Southern California’s huge home-building industry and the drywall companies busted the carpenters union during the 1982 recession by using some of the same Mexican immigrants who are now demanding a union of their own.

If the strikers win a contract, it might be a foot in the door of the home-building industry for unions, which, having been tossed out 10 years ago, would like to represent trades such as framers and roofers again. It might also show that low-wage Mexican immigrants, an increasingly large part of Southern California’s labor force, may be ripe targets for the region’s other unions, too.