Striking Drywallers Hung Tough, and Subcontractors Blinked First

Dozens of drywall subcontractors got to the office on a cool, cloudy Monday in June to find an unpleasant surprise with the morning coffee: Their workers were on strike.

Hundreds were even now marching and waving placards outside the same housing subdivisions they had been working in Friday afternoon.

The workers were demanding their first raise in 10 years. Since none was insured, they wanted health insurance too.

Most of all, though, they wanted a union.

For the subcontractors, it was ironic: 10 years earlier they had used some of these men, all Mexican immigrants, to bust the carpenters union, which was nearly all Anglo.

The workers didn’t seem to have much of a chance. They had little help; the carpenters union, once burned, wanted to see how serious they were before getting deeply involved.

Many of them were here illegally, had little education and didn’t even speak English.

And behind the relatively small drywall companies loomed Southern California’s multibillion-dollar home-building industry. If threatened, it could muster plenty of money, lawyers and political clout.

Now, five months later, the drywall workers have won: They’ll probably sign a contract, as early as Tuesday, with most of the large drywall subcontractors.

When they do, they will turn a page in Southern California labor history.

The 1980s were not kind to labor unions. Membership dropped; unions, such as the air traffic controllers’, got bounced from the workplace; and the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, tilted away from labor under Republican presidents.

Some union officials urged their locals to get out and organize, but many were hesitant to spend the time and money.

And the construction unions in particular haven’t been on the cutting edge of the labor movement anyway. They tend to be conservative, inbred and--critics say--racist and sexist.

And yet here is the largest organizing drive in the nation--the drywall business employs an estimated 4,000 drywall hangers in Southern California.

The more perceptive subcontractors realized what had happened: The immigrants had worked too many 12-hour days fastening plasterboard onto the wooden frames of houses only to be cheated out of their wages. Then last year, in the thick of the recession, the subcontractors cut wages to around $300 a week or less. Had the industry not squeezed the men so hard, it might not now have a messy revolt on its hands.

“Some of it was because the home builders were squeezing us to get our costs down,” said one subcontractor. “But part of it was greed too.”

The construction unions were not blameless, either. Even some union officials concede they were arrogant, inflexible and should have helped out with concessions when the housing industry went in the tank in the 1981-1982 recession.

So in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southern California’s home building industry--heavily unionized since the 1950s--began kicking its unions out, including the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

The drywall workers’ benefits--vacation, pension, health insurance--all disappeared. But wages didn’t go down much, and the business soon attracted hundreds of Mexicans fleeing the poverty of rural Mexico. You could make $500 a week hanging drywall in Southern California, even if it was hot, hard work that eventually twisted and tortured your joints.

There were other drawbacks too. It was no secret that there was a lot of corruption in the drywall industry, even by construction industry standards. When state and federal investigators cracked down on the construction industry three years ago, they picked drywall first.

Some subcontractors were notorious for paying wages in cash, thereby evading the withholding of federal and state income taxes, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation payments. They often paid the men through “labor barons,” usually other Latinos who took a cut of the wages paid to the workers whom the barons provided.

When a subcontractor underpaid him again last fall, Jesus Gomez says, it was one time too many. Gomez, an intense, mustachioed man, knew that it’s hard to organize workers in tough times. On the other hand, he says now, the drywall workers had nothing to lose. He began to meet with other workers about bringing back the union.

“I told them, ‘We shouldn’t put up with this crap anymore,’ ” Gomez says.

“It was a historic event,” says Miguel G. Caballero, legal director of the California Immigrant Workers Assn., a union-funded group in Los Angeles. “It was the first time you had this large a group of Mexican immigrants looking over their economic situation, deciding on their own without a union to walk off the job, and pull the union and the other institutions with them.

“It gives a big boost to the people in the labor movement who are arguing for more organizing.”

When Juan Valadez came north to Orange County from the central Mexican village of El Maguey in 1963, he had no idea he had just started a trend. He found a good job hanging drywall in the suburban county’s booming housing industry. Brothers and cousins followed. By the 1980s, when the drywall work force had become almost completely Mexican, hundreds of its workers were men who had made the 1,300-mile trek from El Maguey.

Like Valadez, many have abandoned any idea of returning; they’ve bought houses and put children through college.

The labor force in the United States, in fact, had become increasingly Latino: By the late 1980s, 12 million people of Mexican origin lived in the United States. And the Mexicans who immigrated here had changed. No longer were they young single men, who most likely worked on a farm and were supporting a family in Mexico that they intended to return to.

Today, most Mexican immigrants come to this country to stay, according to a recent study by the RAND think tank in Santa Monica.

The unions were slow to catch on. They were used to seeing Mexican immigrants as potential strikebreakers; in fact, the labor movement traditionally opposed immigration as a threat to the higher-paid, more skilled white, native workers the unions tended to represent. And the newcomers were hard to organize: many spoke only Spanish, had different customs, and--if in this country illegally--feared being deported.

Although 1.5 million, or 11%, of its 14 million members are Latino, the AFL-CIO has only one Latino on its 33-member executive board. And he was elected only last year after years of complaints.

“The drywall strike is a wake-up call to unions,” says this man, Jack Otero, a senior vice president at the Washingto headquarters of the Transportation and Communication Workers Union.

“There are 8 million Hispanic workers out there,” he says. “But you’ve got to have Hispanic faces, people who speak Spanish, at all levels if you want to reach out to them.”

Ordinarily, a union organizes a company by collecting enough worker signatures to win an election. Then the union bargains with the employer for a contract.

Gomez and the other strike leaders realized, however, that the drywall companies are so small and so spread out over six counties that it was unrealistic to try and hold elections at each one. They decided to simply go on strike demanding a union and a contract at a single stroke. It was an old-time union tactic called a wildcat strike that’s little used these days.

Over the summer, the men picketed each day. But as they got frustrated and short of cash, they also began vandalizing half-built houses and threatening men who continued to work. Clashes with the police--some over modest infractions like minor traffic violations--became a daily occurrence.

The carpenters union, meanwhile, was still keeping a low profile so it wouldn’t be sued by the subcontractors under federal labor laws the union felt was unsympathetic to labor.

It wasn’t working. Even though hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in from the carpenters and other unions, it looked like the subcontractors would merely wait out the workers. Then in August, lawyers for the strikers sued the subcontractors. They had, the lawyers alleged in the federal lawsuits, discovered an amazing fact: For years, the lawyers alleged, subcontractors had never paid hundreds of men a dime of overtime, a violation of federal labor law.

Looking at a long, costly legal battle and the prospect of having to open their financial books to the drywall workers’ lawyers, the subcontractors capitulated. In October, several agreed to talk to the men about a contract.

The strikers won’t get everything they wanted if the region’s largest subcontractors vote to accept the contract Tuesday. The wage rate they agreed upon is slightly lower than what they were making in 1982. But wages won’t go down again, and the men won’t be cheated by the subcontractors. And the strikers got their health insurance too. In the first of several meetings, about 300 Orange County strikers approved the agreement Friday.

This isn’t the first time since the unions got interested in Latinos that a union has organized a big group of Latino workers. For several years in Los Angeles, the Service Employees International Union has been organizing Los Angeles janitors in its “Justice for Janitors” campaign.

It’s not even the first wildcat strike by Latino immigrants. A group of mostly Latino machinists walked out of American Racing Inc., which makes auto wheels near Compton, in 1990.

But the drywall strike is the largest and most visible such campaign so far. And it’s good news for the unions and exploited workers in other industries.

“The strike achieved celebrity status very quickly,” says Joe Shantz, national director of organizing for the AFL-CIO in Washington. “Throughout the Southwest, it’s got workers taking notice of what the drywallers did.”

But even if unions go after this new immigrant “market” of the poorest and most exploited workers, they aren’t likely to halt the long-term decline in union membership--7 million members lost in private industry in the last 20 years alone.

“What you’re seeing is what I would have to call a holocaust,” says Leo Troy, a Rutgers University professor who studies labor unions.

“Compared to it, organizing activity is a spit in the ocean.”

How Workers Built a Union

June

June 1: Hundreds of Southern California drywall workers from the Santa Clarita Valley to the Mexican border and the Inland Empire walk off the job, demanding health benefits, higher pay and a union. They say they are making $300 weekly, have no health insurance and that some are working as many as 60 hours a week.

June 11: Five hundred drywall workers picket outside Days Inn in Fullerton while their employers meet inside to discuss effects of strike.

June 26: Workers allegedly trash half-built homes in tracts in Orange and San Bernardino counties, and come to fisticuffs with laborers and foremen there and in San Diego County.

July

July 2: After two-hour standoff, 148 drywall workers are arrested after allegedly storming a Mission Viejo construction site and taking six workers hostage.

July 6: District attorney’s office drops felony kidnaping charges for lack of evidence, but dozens remain in jail on lesser charges. A few workers make bail, 53 are released on their own recognizance and 88 remain in custody to face deportation proceedings as illegal immigrants.

July 20: Charges against 26 jailed workers are dismissed, as they had been against 42 others two weeks earlier; 48 plead guilty to disturbing the peace; 11 plead guilty to other charges; 19 cases still pending; the rest remain in jail on cases unrelated to the demonstration.

July 28: Drywall workers and their lawyers file complaints with National Labor Relations Board and Department of Labor against home builders and drywall subcontractors.

August-September

Aug. 19: For the third day, drywall workers converge on a small job site in Anaheim, taunting about 40 police to arrest them for blocking the path of a busload of 45 replacement workers.

Sept. 3: Strikers file nine class-action lawsuits against drywall companies for allegedly violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. Their attorney attempts to prevent sale of the homes allegedly built in violation of labor laws.

Sept. 16: Workers bring their protest to Palmdale; 16 are arrested after workers are allegedly attacked and homes under construction vandalized. Drywall work in the area is being done by non-union laborers.

October-November

Oct. 14: After an acrimonious summer of picketing, vandalism and lawsuits, some of Southern California’s drywall subcontractors sit down with carpenters union for the first time in years. Lawsuits are put on hold for companies that have agreed to negotiate with the union.

Oct. 29: After several weeks of negotiations, drywall workers and subcontractors compromise on a contract that will pay about $500 a week, less than the workers were earning 10 years ago, but gives them health insurance.

Oct. 27: Twenty-one striking workers are arrested on suspicion of trespassing at a Palmdale construction site; 14 others are arrested at the same site two days later.

Nov. 6: In the first of several meetings, 300 Orange County drywall strikers approve the tentative contract.

Nov. 10: Thirty-two drywall contractors are expected for vote on the first drywall union contract in more than a decade.

Source: Los Angeles Times Orange County Editorial Library

Researched by DALLAS M. JACKSON / Los Angeles Times