O.C. Laborers’ Union Torn by Bitter Power Struggle : Election: Dissidents seek to oust longtime chief of struggling local which has brought prosperity to Latinos.

A bitter power struggle at Orange County’s oldest Latino labor union may end today as dissidents try to vote out the former plaster worker who has led the union for 15 years.

Little noticed elsewhere, this two-week election is big news in Latino neighborhoods, where Local 652 of the Laborers International Union is a political and economic power that has been a springboard to the middle class for thousands of Mexican immigrants over the years.

During the past six months, the tussle for control of this 4,000-member local has gotten increasingly nasty:

* In January, in front of several hundred astonished members, the head of the local--Marcelino (Matchy) Duarte--and one of his opponents got into a fistfight.

* Three men emerged to run against Duarte for the local’s top job, which pays more than $100,000 a year; all of them allege he is corrupt. One was his longtime aide; when Duarte discovered he was running, he fired him.

* On weekday mornings, some dissidents have even been picketing their own union hall in Santa Ana recently with signs that say “Down With Corruption!” while others hand out leaflets urging “Afuera Con Matchy!”--”Out with Matchy!”

* Both sides have peppered the National Labor Relations Board and the courts with charges against each other since at least last fall. Few have been resolved.

Local 652, which represents manual laborers like pick and shovel workers on construction sites, was the first big local in Orange County in which Latinos became a majority. In a good year, when there’s plenty of work, union members could make $35,000 or $40,000 a year.

The problem is, there’s not much work these days. Like most construction unions, the laborers are in a steep decline and losing members because the real estate market is in a slump.

Whoever leads the local for the next three years will have a long list of difficult tasks: More work has to be found for the 3,000 active members; the local’s depleted health insurance fund must be shored up; and the union has to expand beyond the building industry and into other businesses, such as manufacturing. Its biggest foray so far was a disaster.

Matchy Duarte, 61, is a beefy man who used to be a hod carrier--a person who mixes the plaster on construction sites. As business manager he has run Local 652 for 15 years--since he was first elected in 1978. The union has been good to him: As business manager, the top job in the local, he made $103,140 last year. He got another $4,149 in expenses for a total of $107,289--not out of line for the leader of a local with 4,000 members.

And he has surrounded himself with sharp subordinates, each with his own bloc of votes among the members. These men Duarte also pays well.

In fact, he has a slightly larger staff than some other construction unions, labor experts say--a secretary-treasurer, who makes $105,522 with expenses, and eight other officers, who earn between $53,871 and $72,892.

Generous to allies, he’s heavy-handed--say his opponents--with those who challenge him.

“They run that place like a Communist state,” says union member Sammy Esparza, a candidate for the lesser office of recording secretary who has been picketing the union hall.

Among the complaints: Duarte, critics say, rewards supporters with what little work there is and penalizes dissidents--although critics can’t produce conclusive proof. Two members have complained to the NLRB, which said this week that it’s taking some of these allegations of irregularities seriously enough for a hearing in front of an administrative law judge.

Duarte strongly denies it. His critics fail to understand, he says, that there is little work for everyone these days.

“They’re blaming me for the recession,” he said, shrugging, in a recent interview.

The local is clean, Duarte says, because the government says so: A 1982 racketeering investigation by a federal organized crime strike force resulted in no indictments.

Duarte runs the local from a windowless Santa Ana office with a big marlin mounted on the wall behind his desk. Back here, where he can’t see or hear the picketers, he exudes an air of self-confidence and mastery.

But every now and then in this election, tempers flare and hard words are spoken. That happened in January, when one of the men who complained to the NLRB, Alberto Castillo, silently mocked the union leader during a big union meeting, say people who were there. According to some, Duarte then swore at Castillo. At any rate, Castillo jumped up from his chair and the two threw a punch or two before being pulled apart.

Duarte denies swearing at Castillo and says the attack was unprovoked. Duarte says Castillo questioned his sexual orientation. “He wanted to beat me up.”

Duarte, though, can play rough too. He obtained a list of Castillo’s arrests somewhere and pressed it on a reporter: Among the charges is one for attempted murder in 1987; it was dismissed.

Castillo says he was innocent, and anyway his record has nothing to do with the matter at hand--the union election.

The drama continued even after the fistfight, when the union went to court and got a restraining order against Castillo; Castillo complained to the labor board. After the union agreed to modify the restraining order to let Castillo back into meetings, the board said it decided to dismiss his complaint.

The election has split even some friends and family members.

Take Louie Holguin, for instance. A $57,444-a-year business agent, he was fired in April after Duarte learned he was secretly planning to run against him for the post of business manager.

Now Holguin is not speaking to his godson, Antonio Mendoza, who is running on a slate with Duarte for a seat on the local’s executive board.

Still, are there enough votes to unseat Matchy Duarte after five consecutive, three-year terms? Many of the younger union members are first-generation immigrants, most of whom don’t speak much English. They identify with the sort of strong leaders common in Mexican politics and labor unions, say people familiar with local unions, and many are likely to vote for Duarte.

Another problem for the challengers: It’s hard for dissidents to win control of a union in hard times because the members are less likely to risk change.

And lastly, Duarte’s opposition isn’t unified. David Hernandez, 58--who was the union’s business manager in the late 1970s--leads his own slate. So does Holguin; and so does Chris Perez, 55, a rank-and-file member for 30 years who asks why anyone should trust the other two challengers, since they were once part of the local’s power structure.

Holguin is a 52-year-old former laborer who says he stayed on as a union officer for 15 years because he was trying to change the local from within. “I couldn’t stand the way Matchy ran it,” Holguin said.

“I can’t prove Matchy was behind it, but I know there was favoritism in assigning work there.”

Some people say Holguin has sewn up the votes of the 1,000 or so retirees, who can still vote and who tend to stay involved in union politics--particularly now that their benefits are dwindling.

So are benefits for active members: So few have jobs now that the health insurance fund they contribute to when they are working is short of cash--so short, in fact, that Laborers locals all over Southern California have had to appropriate $1 from the $9 or so an hour in benefits that employers pay their members.

That dollar normally goes for vacation pay, but now it’s being diverted into the health insurance fund. The men grouse about their diminished vacation pay, but there doesn’t seem much anybody can do.

The dissidents also grumble about Duarte’s salary and the half a dozen or so houses and condos that property records show he owns--including a getaway in the Mexican resort town of Cabo San Lucas.

In deference to the hundreds of members of Local 652 who are out of work, Duarte says he’ll take about a 15% pay cut--to $83,000--when his new term begins. “But I’m chief here,” Duarte said. “I’ve got to make more money than they do.”

The union, meanwhile, has a bigger problem: It’s been shrinking for years as the building industry goes through its inevitable economic cycles of boom and bust. A lot of contractors have stopped using union workers in the last couple of recessions. And other construction unions have raided turf that the Laborers union considers its own.

At the time of the federal investigation 11 years ago, Local 652 had 7,000 active and retired members--3,000 more than today’s total.

“It’s gonna be a nightmare for whoever wins,” said George Garcia, who’s running with Hernandez, the former leader of the local. “It’s in such bad shape, you can’t turn it around overnight. But that’s what these guys are expecting.”

Meanwhile, the local’s biggest try at expanding outside the construction industry ended two years ago in a crushing defeat.

Conservative Orange County isn’t exactly a hotbed of union sentiment, so when in 1991 the Laborers tried to organize 1,000 assembly-line workers at an ITT Canon electronics plant in Santa Ana, it was said to be the largest union drive here in 20 years.

The union was smashed in the election by a margin of 5 to 1.

In fact, the biggest problem for whoever winds up running the local will be stemming this slow leak of members that plagues so many unions.

Today though, there’s a two-week-long election to finish and ballots to count.

“This union used to be a family,” said Perez, one of Duarte’s opponents. As a supervisor, he once helped build the Crystal Cathedral and the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Now he’s out of work, and has been for a year. “We were the strongest local in Southern California 15 years ago.

“Now it’s, ‘If you argue with me, you don’t work anymore.’ ”

Not so, says Duarte: “In every big local, you always have dissidents.

“But the silent majority supports me.”