Carpenters’ Strike Faces Long Odds : Labor: For two months, Southland house framers have picketed for better pay and benefits. But unlike drywallers three years ago, their demands have gone unheard.

Three years ago, when hundreds of Southern California drywallers marched in the streets to win union contracts, David Vasquez wanted to throw down his hammer and join them. But Vasquez, a carpenter, says his fellows in the trade just weren’t united.

Today, the carpenters are making their stand.

In the pre-dawn darkness, the 27-year-old Santa Ana man sits in the front row of a bus full of Mexican immigrants whose livelihoods come from framing houses. As tropical Spanish-language music blares from speakers, the bus pulls up to a construction site on a hilltop here overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

“ Companeros, unense con nosotros !” Vasquez and the other picketers chant over the din of workers pounding nails and sawing wood. “Compatriots, come and join us!” Officers in half a dozen sheriff’s patrol cars look on.

For two months now, hundreds of carpenters have been picketing at job sites across the Southland, demanding union contracts, better wages and health insurance for themselves and their families.

Like that of the drywallers, the framers’ movement is an immigrant labor struggle, seen by some as following in the tradition of uprisings in farming, hotel and janitorial work.

But unlike the boisterous drywallers’ strike three years ago--which ended after four months with contractors capitulating to a union contract that boosted wages and set uniform pay scales--the framers’ demands haven’t been heard.

The carpenters’ efforts are getting turned back by the courts--and by workers fearful of taking risks in a weak housing market. Their movement has not garnered the publicity that might generate sympathy, or the financial assistance to underwrite the strike.

And conspicuously absent from the latest campaign is the grass-roots community support that drove the drywallers’ fight.

“The two strikes are really karmically different,” says a longtime construction union leader. “Worker angst is there, but it may be that the dynamics have changed.”

Most of the estimated 5,000 framing carpenters in the region are Latino men in their 20s and 30s. Their anger is fueled by the fact that their earning power has fallen by half over the last decade, to $80 a day or less. Some framers say they make no more than minimum wage.

Unionized construction workers, by contrast, average $22 an hour, plus benefits.

The framers’ campaign has been marred by sporadic violence and vandalism, but less so than the tumultuous drywaller strike three years ago, which led to more than 600 arrests.

In that case, the disturbances may have helped the drywallers’ cause, stirring support as the wives and children of the picketers demonstrated in the streets.

This time, the framing companies and builders have been able to use the labor violence to blunt the pickets. They have obtained injunctions and filed a stack of lawsuits against the carpenters union local that is orchestrating the strike--something contractors could not do in 1992 because the drywallers’ strike was an independent movement of workers, not union driven.

The employers also have put up fences and hired private security to keep strikers at bay. The carpenters union has denied responsibility for any illegal picket activity, adding that the occasional violence can be attributed not just to picketers but to workers at the sites as well. Law enforcement confirms the union’s claim.

Nonetheless, the court actions have forced the union to pull back some effective pickets, bolstering confidence among builders that they will be able to put down the organizing campaign.

“It isn’t going to happen,” said an executive at J. M. Peters Co., a big home builder in Newport Beach. “They won’t stop us.”

Carpenters Local 2361 in Orange, which is leading the strike, has had some success. Of the region’s estimated 75 framing contractors, the union says 19 have agreed to a union contract. That guarantees an experienced framer at least $156 a day.

But some of the firms were unionized before the campaign began, and those that have not signed include most of the bigger ones.

Diane Layden, a University of Redlands associate professor who is writing a book on the drywallers’ strike, thinks the framers’ movement still can succeed--if there is worker determination, financial support and community backing.

A successful outcome, she says, would continue the strides made by immigrant labor in the construction industry: “It would be significant for Latino workers in Southern California.”

Labor officials acknowledge that an internal campaign, aimed at winning enough support to hold union elections at the various companies, could take years.

In comparison, the 1992 strike caught fire early on.

The drywallers were supported by more than a dozen volunteer attorneys who filed suits against contractors charging labor abuses, several prominent grass-roots organizations and donations nationwide that totaled $2 million. The carpenters haven’t sought the same kind of help, although leaders say the union plans to.

“Lessons sometimes are so obvious that they may be passed by without being learned,” says Jose De Paz, executive director of the California Immigrant Workers Assn. in Compton, one of several activist groups that helped the drywallers.

Without the community rallying to the framers’ cause, analysts say they have little chance of winning, especially given the tough economic conditions they face.

Part of it is timing. Southern California’s housing industry is worse off today than in June, 1992, when the drywallers went on strike. In April, when the framers launched their walkout, home sales in the state fell to their lowest levels since 1984, tumbling 41% in Orange County and 15% in Los Angeles County from a year earlier. New residential building permits issued in the five-county Southland area fell 20% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to the Construction Industry Research Board.

“Economics being what they are, it puts developers in a position where they can keep [wages] going lower and lower,” said Jim Harrison, a supervisor at Contemporary Framing, a large Orange County contractor. Framing companies are forced to cut wages to survive, he says.

But Baldwin Keenan, a representative at Carpenters Local 2361 and a leader of the framers’ strike, questioned whether contractors were really ailing--or simply not making as much money as before. He says the union’s goal is to sign up most of the framing companies so wages can be raised and standardized.

Keenan, 47, a lean, bearded man who speaks fluent Spanish, remembers the days before construction unions lost their footing in the early 1980s. Even for a few years after that, the building boom kept framing wages relatively high. But when the market began slowing and the numbers of immigrant workers in construction grew, wages took a precipitous fall.

Some contractors blame the current problem on an influx of Latino workers, some of whom are not properly skilled or will work for substandard wages. Keenan agrees that training has been a problem, but blames the employers for creating it, saying they made unbridled use of the cheaper labor.

“Like the extra child in the agricultural field, we have young boys who are packing lumber” and doing other work once done by carpenters, Keenan says. “The foreman looks the other way. What this does is, it creates a rather low skill level.”

Fred Hovenier, vice president of Lawrence-Hovenier Inc., a framing contractor in Corona, agrees that the wages and skill levels of framers now vary widely. The firm has been a union company since the late 1970s, but Hovenier says that has not posed a disadvantage; his company hires properly trained and skilled workers who do the job efficiently.

“If the union is successful, I think it would benefit everybody,” Hovenier said. The union, he explained, would act as a “policing agent” to maintain high skill levels and wages in the framing industry.

That would be a dream come true for Vasquez, the Santa Ana carpenter.

Vasquez entered the construction industry as a teen-ager shortly after arriving in Southern California 12 years ago. As a boy living in Mexico City, he had learned how to make cabinets and tables from his uncle.

Like many framers, Vasquez never had formal training. Instead, he first worked as a laborer, fetching nails for friends who worked as journeymen carpenters. After six months, he invested about $300 in a power saw, hammer, measuring tape and other tools of the trade and began drumming up work by going from one job site to another.

From 1986 to 1989, Vasquez says he worked 11 out of the 12 months in a year, often taking home $700 a week. But since then, Vasquez says his pay has dropped by half. And he has no health insurance for himself, his wife or their three young daughters.

Three months ago, when Vasquez first heard word of plans for a walkout, he went to the union hall and became one of the first to sign up. He has since become one of the strike leaders, wearing a pager and carrying around a clipboard of picketers’ names and targets.

“I’m fighting for my family’s future,” he said on the picketers’ bus.

Times staff writer Debora Vrana contributed to this story.