Feuding Sours Success of O.C. Drywall Strike

ORANGE —  A year ago, a few hundred Mexican immigrants took on Southern California’s powerful home-building industry--and won.

Bound by blood--many came from the same village in Mexico--they endured five months of picketing and poverty.

But now those ties are wearing thin. The leadership is feuding. And two big unions are squabbling over who will represent the men, souring one of the labor movement’s biggest victories in Southern California in years.

Some of the workers, who nail up the interior walls of new homes, complain that they won a union but that those who crossed their picket lines are now getting many of the jobs. Some say their union gave away too much when it negotiated their contract.

Grumbling about contracts is common among union members. This dispute, however, threatens to rend a grass-roots movement of the Mexican immigrants who now dominate Southern California’s home-building work force--a movement that once promised new vitality for the moribund building trades unions.

“It’s too bad,” said Jesus Gomez, one of the strike leaders. “Everybody worked so hard.”

What happened?

When the immigrants struck the drywall industry last June 1, few people gave them much chance of winning. As many as a fourth of the men were in this country illegally, making them vulnerable to intimidation. Some were illiterate even in their native Spanish, and many had little experience with unions.

The first workers came from the village of El Maguey, northwest of Mexico City, in the 1960s.

By the late 1970s, dozens of cousins, brothers and uncles had followed to find work nailing up drywall--the big sheets of plasterboard that form the inner walls of most new buildings.

There was plenty of work because the drywall subcontractors were busting their unions. As the unions left, their members--most of whom were Anglo--decamped too.

Wages didn’t go down much at first as the housing market boomed in the 1980s. A man from El Maguey could earn what seemed like a fortune--$500 or more a week, depending on his skill and experience. (Drywallers are paid a piece rate for the drywall they nail up.)

But without the unions, there wasn’t any more health insurance. And many subcontractors, the workers say, paid in cash, cheating the government out of taxes and the men out of their wages.

Some of their own people, the men say, became “labor barons,” willing--for a kickback--to supply a cheap labor force for the back-breaking work of nailing up the 100-pound sheets of drywall.

Then, after the housing market went into decline at the end of the 1980s, builders began squeezing their subcontractors to reduce prices.

The subcontractors, including drywallers, had only one place to cut: wages. Suddenly men working 60-hour weeks were making $300.

Drywall work, once a blue-collar stepping stone to the middle class, had become just another low-wage enclave of Southern California’s underclass, like washing dishes or sewing dresses.

On that cloudy morning a year ago, hundreds of men walked off the job and began picketing their employers. There are as many as 4,000 drywallers in Southern California, though not all of them are working at the same time even when the housing industry is booming.

Still, even if there were jobs for only half those people, their number made the organizing drive the largest in the nation last year. It was also notable because the immigrants did much of the organizing themselves.

The men asked the International Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners for help.

The union kept a low profile, at first because it, too, doubted the men could win against the power and wealth of the builders. Later, it kept its head down to avoid being sued by builders who said their half-finished houses were being vandalized and by subcontractors who said their workers were intimidated by strikers.

Without work, many of the men soon went through their savings. The unions--including the carpenters--contributed to a strike fund that is said to have eventually reached several million dollars.

The carpenters and other groups that supported the strike are vague when asked how much money was spent, for they are still being sued by San Diego subcontractors who contend that the unions were behind the strike’s sporadic vandalism and violence.

Even with the strike fund, though, it was hard for the men to keep food on their families’ tables as the summer dragged on.

They might have abandoned the strike and gone back to work had not their lawyers come up with the strategy of suing the companies for failing to pay overtime for work over 40 hours a week, a violation of federal labor law.

Rather than spend a fortune on lawyers or open their books to the strikers, the subcontractors--most of whom run relatively small companies--signed a contract in November, about five months after the strike started.

The men got their first raise in 10 years, though wages were still slightly less than what they had been in 1982. They also got health insurance, though they had to pay half the cost. In most carpenters’ contracts, the employer shoulders the full cost of the health plan.

The union also agreed to accept all the men who had defied the strike and crossed the picket lines. At first, as many as half of an employer’s workers could be men who didn’t strike; later even more could be non-strikers, the contract said.

That provision in particular would cause trouble for the union later.

“The business was 12 years without a union,” said Michael Olds, who runs the carpenters union local in Orange that lent its union hall for what became strike headquarters.

“People have to realize this was the best contract we could get at the time. After all, the building industry is in a depression.”

Today, there is plenty of grumbling among the 800 men who walked the picket lines last year.

Those still out of work resent the strikebreakers who are working steadily. Some of the strikers who have jobs--many of whom were accustomed to being paid in cash--are dismayed to learn how big a bite taxes and union dues take out of their paychecks now that they have emerged from the underground economy.

“People are really bitching about the deductions,” said Nicolas Munoz, a strike leader who still supports the carpenters union.

The men must pay half the cost of their health insurance--as much as $53 for a 40-hour week--and $20 for union dues.

“With all the deductions,” one subcontractor said, “they may be making less than they were before the strike.”

Though the contract gave the workers a raise to about $500 from the rock-bottom $300 or less they had been making for a 60-hour week, most are now taking home less than they did 10 years ago.

“Everybody says we deserve more money,” Munoz said, “but they have to remember, this is just a start, and for a start it’s all right.”

In March, at least two of the half dozen or so original leaders of the strike--some of them childhood friends from El Maguey--left and joined the painters union after being passed over for jobs at the carpenters union.

Because those two helped negotiate the union contract, they don’t criticize the wages or the health insurance plan.

Instead, they say, the carpenters union hasn’t enforced its own contract: Employers continue to hire men who crossed the picket line and exclude strikers.

The carpenters union, the dissidents say, doesn’t care: It’s getting its dues because all the drywall workers--those who struck and those who stayed--are now members.

“Eighty percent of the people working now were scabs,” said Antonio Hernandez, a leader who is now disenchanted with the carpenters union, “and the guys who went on strike are being blackballed.”

The union admits that many of those working steadily these days were among those who crossed the picket lines, while some strike supporters are having trouble finding work because home-building is so slow.

During contract negotiations, though, the companies refused to abandon workers who had stuck by them during the strike.

“It was a sweet deal for the carpenters and a rotten deal for the workers,” said Nativo V. Lopez of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, an advocacy group for Mexican immigrants. “They won, but they lost.”

The subcontractors adamantly deny discriminating against strikers and, indeed, say they would be stupid to stir up trouble so soon after having achieved labor peace.

“It’s to our benefit to put these guys back to work. They had a lawsuit against us,” said Brian Maag of Orange County Drywall in Tustin, president of the drywall companies’ trade association. “I can’t answer for the rest of the companies, but 70% of my people are guys who were out on strike.”

The International Brotherhood of Painters, too, has a stake in the situation.

Before the building industry busted the unions in the 1970s, the painters represented drywall “tapers,” the workers who smooth out the seams between the sheets of drywall once they are nailed in place.

Now the carpenters represent both hangers and tapers. And the painters union, which will soon close its Orange County offices because of declining membership, isn’t happy about that. Indeed, local officers of the two unions took their disagreement to their respective bosses, who met in Washington last year but never resolved the turf fight.

Altogether, according to the carpenters union, 2,200 workers have joined them since the strike--a huge influx of new members for a local union.

The battlefield has now shifted from Los Angeles and Orange counties to San Diego, where the big subcontractors still resist the union drive and hundreds of workers are still up for grabs.

The strikers’ lawyers have sued eight drywall companies, alleging once again that they did not pay overtime for what is said to be a typical drywall hanger’s week: six days, 60 hours.

The San Diego subcontractors in turn accused the carpenters union of racketeering, saying it urged the strikers to vandalism and violence.

The first overtime suit isn’t likely to come to trial before the end of the year, said Robert A. Cantore, a Los Angeles lawyer for the strikers. The racketeering lawsuit is similarly far off.

As the carpenters union has bogged down in San Diego, the painters have stepped in. Hernandez, the dissident strike leader, says the painters have signed up 2,000 drywallers all over Southern California--some of them already in the carpenters union, Hernandez hints.

Painters union officials did not return phone calls last week. But they did announce that top union officials will hold a press conference Tuesday--the anniversary of the strike--to “discuss their plans to restore fair wages and benefits to the thousands of workers who toil in the residential drywall industry.”

The drywall industry in the rest of Southern California, meanwhile, says it is settling into being unionized again for the first time in more than 10 years.

Fifty-three companies have signed the union contract, leaving only a dozen or so smaller companies non-union.

So far, there have been no major problems: Even the home builders--most of whom shrilly opposed the strike--seem resigned to their drywall subcontractors being union again.

One of them is Gordon Tippell, chairman of Taylor Woodrow Homes and president of the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County.

The drywall subcontractors he uses are now unionized. But the home-building industry, he said, “has been suffering so badly the last few years that there really hasn’t been any noticeable difference.

“Their prices are a little higher,” he said of his union subcontractors, “but not enough to cause us a great problem.”