Priest Leads Drywaller Protest at Church : Labor: Father Victor Salandini opposes Bishop Robert Brom’s hiring of a non-union contractor to build a new church in Poway.

Striking drywallers, led by an activist priest, demonstrated against San Diego Bishop Robert Brom on Sunday and picketed at a Poway church that protesters said is being constructed with non-union labor.

The unique protest pitted Father Victor Salandini against Brom, leader of the county’s Catholic community and Salandini’s superior. Salandini, who also is known as “The Tortilla Priest,” has ministered to the United Farm Workers in the past and is now working with striking drywallers.

About 300 drywall workers, most of them Latino, are on strike in the county to protest contractors’ refusal to hire union workers. The workers joined a strike by hundreds of other drywallers that began in Orange County in July and spread throughout Southern California.

Sunday’s picketing also was organized to protest Brom’s decision to award a contract for the construction of St. Michael’s Church in Poway to Menefee-Larsen Construction Co., which Salandini said pays drywallers substandard wages of about $5 an hour. The multimillion-dollar church, which is being built on Pomerado Road, will have a seating capacity of almost 1,000 when it is completed.

Brom could not be reached for comment Sunday, but Salandini said the bishop’s policy is to hire non-union contractors because union contractors “are too expensive, and the diocese’s money must be spent wisely.”

Menefee-Larsen’s offices were closed Sunday, and company officials were not available for comment.

On Sunday, Salandini celebrated Mass from the back of a flatbed pickup truck for about 75 workers and their families in a field adjacent to St. Michael’s. “The bishop cannot practice unbridled capitalism,” Salandini told the impromptu congregation.

He celebrated Mass dressed in a rough-hewn vestment adorned with the black eagle of the UFW. The red cloth draped over the altar also was adorned with the UFW eagle.

Members of the mostly white, middle-class parish, who were attending Mass inside a temporary church, looked at the predominantly Latino group of protesters with apparent indifference as they left.

The Mass celebrated by Salandini featured labor songs sung in Spanish and speeches by several workers, whose political remarks were substituted for the traditional homily.

Salandini and the speakers made it clear that the protest was against Brom and Menefee-Larsen and not against the Catholic Church.

“We are protesting against the bishop and a non-union contractor,” said Antonio Hernandez, spokesman for the strikers.

After the protest Mass, the strikers and their families picketed in front of the church on Pomerado Road, shouting “We want a union!”

Fran Willenbrink, a St. Michael’s parishioner who said he is a project manager for the new church, said he empathized with the strikers but said there was little that the bishop or the church could do.

“We have no control over who Menefee-Larsen hires. We can understand their feelings, but really they should be talking to the general contractor,” Willenbrink said.

He agreed with the strikers, who say that, because many of them are Mexican immigrants, they are often exploited by some unscrupulous contractors, who work them for weeks at a time without paying them.

“The economic situation is such that some contractors will do anything to make an extra dollar. Some don’t care how they treat workers,” Willenbrink said.

Striking workers are demanding better pay and union representation. They say that wages and working conditions have worsened dramatically in the construction industry since contractors broke up drywall unions 10 years ago, replacing union employees with lower-paid, recently arrived Mexican immigrants.