Drywallers Picket Costa Mesa Home Builder : Demonstration: More than 250 workers protest Standard Pacific Corp.’s use of a subcontractor that hasn’t signed a union contract.

More than 250 union drywall workers--some from as far away as Ventura County--picketed Costa Mesa home builder Standard Pacific Corp. on Thursday for using a drywall subcontractor that hasn’t signed a union contract.

Since November, workers say, they have persuaded 53 subcontractors to sign the contract, which gives workers their first raise in more than 10 years.

But Schetne Drywall Inc. of Laguna Hills, a middle-sized subcontractor that the workers say does much of Standard Pacific’s drywall work, has yet to sign.

“We’re picketing to turn up the pressure on them,” said Jesus Gomez, who led Mexican drywall workers in a five-month strike last year to get the subcontractors to recognize a union and sign a contract.

That strike won a major victory few had expected when the region’s biggest subcontractors agreed to negotiate. In November, they signed a contract with a slightly lower wage rate than 10 years ago but which provided workers with health insurance.

Much of the drywall industry remains non-union, though, including all the subcontractors in San Diego. Drywallers nail up the plasterboard that forms the inner walls of houses.

Clad in jeans and T-shirts, the workers carried picket signs and chanted for about two hours around noon Thursday. While Standard Pacific executives watched from the parking lot, the pickets crowded the sidewalk outside the company’s low-slung office building in a Costa Mesa neighborhood of offices and warehouses.

Schetne did not return a phone call Thursday.

Standard Pacific’s profit fell 43% last year. Like other builders, it has been hit by the slump in building. The company said Thursday’s surprise protest by the drywall workers won’t change its choice of subcontractors. “We should have the right to hire whom we want to,” said April Morris, chief financial officer.