Falling Wages, Lack of Jobs Spark Rare Labor Movement : Construction: About 1,000 drywall installers are into a three-month walkout. They are seeking better pay and acceptance of a union by the building industry.

ORANGE —  At age 56, Silberio Nieto has helped build hundreds of houses from Ventura to San Diego, through boom times as well as bust. Working side by side with his two grown sons, Nieto used to believe that he was doing more than constructing nice tract homes for prosperous Anglo families he would never meet; he thought he was building a comfortable life for his family.

But after 15 years, he has little to show for lifting and nailing 100-pound sheets of plaster on walls--sometimes six days a week, 12 hours a day--except a lean, sore body and callused hands.

Nieto’s income, as high as $23,000 a year in good times, has been whittled to around $6,000, and he was dismayed to see his paycheck shrinking to smaller than what it was a decade ago despite working just as hard, if not harder. His wallet empty and the rent unpaid, Nieto grimly confided to his wife, Linda, that he doubts that he can find another occupation at his age.

“So many homes we have built, I have built,” said the gray-haired grandfather, who rents a house in Riverside. “And none of them are mine.”

Banding together, frustrated workers such as Nieto have ignited one of the largest, most organized and highest-profile labor movements in recent years in Southern California, which is known as unfriendly terrain for unions.

The three-month walkout of about 1,000 drywallers is a show of solidarity among a group of mostly immigrant workers, many of whom are not U.S. citizens or are virtually unaware of constitutional rights and the tumultuous, bloody birth of American unions.

Most pressing, the strikers say, is their demand for increased wages, although they also are seeking acceptance of a union by the building industry and benefits such as health insurance, pensions and vacations. They say they are prepared to strike for months, and their attorneys have filed 15 class-action suits against drywall companies for alleged violations of labor laws.

Tensions have escalated as the strike has spawned sporadic vandalism at construction sites as well as fights between striking and non-striking drywallers, including one clash with police in which 63 men were arrested and another in which 150 men were taken into custody.

Police in riot gear have frequently faced off with the demonstrators to keep them away from construction sites. One San Bernardino County sheriff’s sergeant said some vandalism and fighting occurs in all strikes, but this walkout has resulted in more than most.

The labor unrest stems from the cyclical, maturing process that occurs among all immigrant work forces, said Raul Hinojosa, a UCLA professor of urban planning who specializes in Latino immigration and U.S.-Mexico relations.

“As people are here for a while, they begin to organize and demand their rights,” Hinojosa said. “Clearly, they have been fed up for a long time, but now they are saying: ‘We have to take a stand because we have nothing to lose.’ ”

But as the strikers cry foul over reduced wages, Southern California’s builders say that the drywall workers are paid fairly and are victims of the severe recession that has crippled the entire industry.

Because of trouble obtaining financing and a severe slump in sales, home builders in the last two years have been forced to lay off many employees. Some have declared bankruptcy.

“This is the most difficult recession in the 30 years I’ve been in business,” said George Lightner, president of Lightner Development Inc. in Rancho Cucamonga. “Everyone in the industry has had to lower prices. These are very difficult times.”

Bob Sato, president of a drywall contractors trade association, said the industry had too many contractors and laborers--even during good times--which kept drywallers’ wages low.

“There were too many contractors attracted by the boom, and the greater the supply, the smaller the demand,” Sato said. “There was an increase in the availability of labor, so wages went down too.”

In the more skilled construction trades, such as plumbing and electrical work, strong unions exist, so wages among those workers remained higher as the pay scale of drywallers dropped, he said.

Now, the solidarity among striking drywallers is so strong that Antonio Vasquez, 55, recalls that when sheriff’s deputies tried to arrest half a dozen strikers, more than 150 clustered around and insisted that if those men go, “then we all should go.” Together, they raised their arms, waited for the handcuffs, and the deputies had no choice but to arrest them all.

The July incident at a Mission Viejo construction site was by far the largest sheriff’s sweep of the strikers, who were arrested on charges of trespassing and suspicion of conspiracy to kidnap.

They were accused of taking six drywall workers from the site, but the kidnaping charges were never filed. The other charges were dropped against nearly half the demonstrators. The rest pleaded guilty.

“The Americans who live here don’t understand what we’re fighting for at all. But these men are very serious about the strike,” said Maria Rosa Lopez, a leader of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a national immigrant rights group that has helped organize the strike.

About 90% of the non-unionized laborers in Southern California’s residential drywall business are Latino, many of them Mexican immigrants in their late 20s and early 30s. No one is sure how many are in the country illegally, but when police arrested the 150 strikers in July, one-third were illegal and the rest were first- or second-generation legal immigrants. Many, such as Nieto, who migrated here in 1962, have lived more years in the United States than they did in their native Mexico.

Contractors pay drywallers “by the piece”--a set amount for every square foot of drywall they hang. Their wages, 7 to 9 cents per square foot from 1982 through 1991, have bottomed out at about 4 or 5 cents because of the recession.

That rate translates into about $300 per 40-hour week--or $7.50 an hour--about half of what they were making five years ago when construction jobs were easier to find, according to interviews with the workers.

Nieto was among 200 men who waited in a carpenters union hall in Orange one recent day, hoping to hear an encouraging word three months into the strike. They pull into the parking lot each day about 7 a.m., take turns cooking donated food, and head off to a strike site, often in western Riverside County. At lunch in the union hall, they swap stories from the picket lines and discuss news of the strike.

Before learning drywall work from a friend in the late 1970s, Nieto trained grizzly bears and cougars in Buena Park for a now-defunct park called Enchanted Village. But, as his wife says, “There isn’t much of a demand for bear trainers these days.”

Like many other strikers, Nieto said he has no intention of signing up for welfare or unemployment compensation. He wants to work, and drywalling is his family’s business. He had expected to do it until the day his back gave out, and he trained his sons when they were teen-agers. Now the three of them are still side by side--not on the construction site, but on the picket line.

Nieto’s son Jose, 29, who has hung drywall for 10 years, said he joined the strike a month ago after watching police pushing and hitting the striking drywallers at a job site.

“I thought it was not right for me to work while they were suffering. This is a just thing that we want,” he said. “One way or another, we are going to win. . . . If they want violence, violence they will have.”

Times staff writers Michael Flagg and David Reyes contributed to this report.