Oppressed Take a Stand in Drywallers' Strike : Labor: Traditionally powerless Latino immigrants band together in walkout, which has stronghold in O.C.

By Marla Cone

Sept. 7, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> This story was reported by Times staff writers Marla Cone, Michael Flagg, David Reyes and Eric Young. It was written by Cone</i>

At age 56, Silverio Nieto has helped craft hundreds of homes from Ventura to San Diego, through boom times as well as bust. Working side by side with his two grown sons, Nieto used to think that he was doing more than building nice tract homes for prosperous families he would never meet; he thought he was building a comfortable life for his own clan.

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 about $6,000, even as he worked as hard, if not harder, than a decade ago. His wallet empty, Nieto grimly confides to his wife, Linda, that he doubts that he can find another occupation at his age.

The irony is not lost on Nieto, a drywall hanger who owns no property and rents a house in Riverside. “So many homes we have built, I have built,” the gray-haired grandfather says in soft-spoken Spanish, “and none of them are mine.”

Banding together, frustrated Mexican immigrants like Nieto have ignited one of the largest, most organized and highest-profile labor movements in Southern California’s recent past--and they have done it on terrain notoriously unfriendly to unions.

The 3-month-old walkout of an estimated 1,000 drywall workers, which has found a stronghold in Orange County, is an uprising of a traditionally powerless ethnic group, a showing of solidarity among an economically oppressed people. Many are not even full-fledged citizens; most are virtually unaware of their constitutional rights and the tumultuous, bloody birth of American unions.

After spending their lives building tract homes they could never afford, feeling more exploited as the recession hit the lower class especially hard, the drywall hangers say they have nothing to lose.

This 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 immigration and U.S.-Mexico relations.

“As people are here for a while, they begin to organize and demand their rights,” Hinojosa said. “And they become the most militant because they are also the most exploited. They were hired in the first place because they were so readily exploited, but in the United States, like Lincoln said, you can’t fool everybody all the time.

“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.’ ”

The defiance among Latino laborers, dubbed the “shadow society” by one Orange County Catholic monsignor, springs more from close family ties than from the influence of organized labor or some charismatic leader.

A worker persuades his cousin to join the walkout, who persuades his son, who spreads the word to his brother, who tells his son-in-law, and almost spontaneously, they unite. Many migrated from the same village in the Mexican state of Guanajuato that offers but a few small shoe factories and little else for employment.

“Immigration is a very cohesive, social process and it builds solidarity, so it is not at all surprising that they are now standing up for the rights they feel are being abused,” Hinojosa said.

Their solidarity is so strong that Antonio Vasquez, 55, recalls when Orange County sheriff’s deputies tried to arrest half a dozen of the strikers in July, more than 150 clustered around them, insisting that if those men go, “then we all should go.” Together, they quietly raised their arms, waiting for the handcuffs, and the deputies had no choice but to arrest them all.

“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 from its regional base in Santa Ana.

Like Jose Garcia, 24, these laborers keep asking the same question: “Why do our salaries go down while the price of homes goes up?” Garcia said. “If they paid us better, the economy of California would be better. We would have money to take our children to Disneyland.”

Most Laborers Latinos

The overwhelming majority of the estimated 4,000 non-unionized laborers in Southern California’s residential drywall business are Latino, primarily Mexican immigrants in their late 20s and early 30s. No one knows how many are in the country illegally, but when sheriff’s deputies arrested 150 strikers last month, one-third were suspected of being undocumented. The rest were first- or second-generation legal immigrants.

Support for the strikers is not isolated to Southern California’s immigrants. Much of the ethnic community, just as frustrated by its economic status, is rooting for them.

“There’s a lot of us who feel this way. . . . They’re fulfilling a part of what’s been called the American Dream,” said Rick Rodriguez, an Orange County representative of California Advocates for Fair Employment, an association of state employees that helped deliver 15,000 pounds of food to the strikers.

Southern California’s builders say drywall workers are generally paid fairly but are victims of a severe recession that has crippled the industry. Because of difficulty obtaining financing and a severe slump in sales, home builders in the past two years have been forced to lay off 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.”

But the economic plight of the drywall laborers began long before the recession, and they complain that they didn’t get a fair share when the business boomed in the 1980s. Drywall workers’ wages haven’t gone up since 1982. A little over a year ago, their wages were cut by about one-third because of the economic slump. To make matters worse, work is so scarce that more people are competing for fewer jobs.

Bob Sato, who works for a Newbury Park drywall firm called Tricon and is the president of a drywall contractors’ trade association, said the industry had too many contractors and laborers, even during good times, which kept drywall hangers’ wages low.

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

“But I doubt (builders) made as much of a killing as you might think. For the builder, land, fees and other costs went through the roof in the ‘80s. They were looking for places to cut costs, too, and if land prices and fees are fixed, then they look at labor.”

More skilled construction trades, such as plumbers and electricians, were strong union bastions, so their wages remained higher, he said.

Contractors pay drywall workers “by the piece”--a set amount for every square foot of drywall they hang--similar to the garment industry. Their wages, which averaged about seven cents per square foot between 1982 and 1991, bottomed out before the strike at about four or five cents because of the recession.

Many say they averaged about $300 a week when the strike began--about half the amount drywall workers earned five years ago.

That is about one-third less than the $444 average weekly pay for Latino men reported in a 1991 UCLA survey of 1,086 Latinos in California.

Latino activists and researchers say the drywall hangers epitomize the ethnic group, who as a whole show a strong work ethic but are given few opportunities to succeed.

“They are working hard and getting married and obeying the law and paying taxes,” said David Hayes-Bautista, director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health, who just completed a study of Latinos’ family values and economic status. “These guys are almost paragons of civic responsibility. But their wages are very, very low, they have virtually no benefits and they are trying to raise families, so I can see why they feel frustration.”

Many of the laborers say they feel the scorn of whites who call them “wetbacks” or “illegals,” no matter how hard they work and how many of their generations have lived in this country.

“We have constructed the majority of the homes where the people live, but people don’t see that,” said Pablo Sagaon, 29, another striking drywall hanger.

Their most pressing demand is to have their wages returned to the higher rate, although they also are seeking acceptance of a union by the building industry and benefits such as health insurance, pensions and vacations. Their attorneys have filed 15 class-action lawsuits against drywall companies for alleged violations of labor laws.

Some Acts of Violence

The strikers say they are prepared to continue their walkout for months. Some have resorted to violence and vandalism, attacking co-workers who refuse to strike and shattering windows at construction sites, which have angered builders. Some even allegedly kidnaped six men who were working as drywall hangers in Mission Viejo.

Nieto, wearing leather boots, jeans and a pushed-back baseball cap, is among 200 men who wait anxiously in a Carpenter’s Union hall in Orange, 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, usually in western Riverside County. At lunch in the union hall, they swap stories from the picket lines and discuss news of the strike.

Nieto confides that he and his wife recently lost their mobile home because they couldn’t make the payments. He is determined to ride out the strike with the others for as long as it takes or begin the difficult search for another job if strikers’ demands aren’t ultimately met.

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, Linda, says, “there isn’t much of a demand for bear trainers these days.”

“Yes, I had dreams when I began (drywall work), and I reached them. I wanted to be able to provide for my children, and I did. I wanted to buy a van, and I bought it. I wanted to buy a truck, and I bought one,” he said.

But he adds, “How can I save money with this salary?” His family’s rent is $400 per month and Linda, 51, is on disability payments.

Like many other strikers, Nieto says he has no intention of ever signing up for welfare or unemployment compensation. He wants to work, and drywall hanging is his family’s business. He expected to do it as long as his body held out.

He trained his sons when they were teens. Now the three of them are still side by side--not on the construction site, but on the picket line.

Nieto is not alone among Latinos in his strong desire to work and his aversion to welfare, according to a recent study by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

The researchers found that 75% of Latino men in California were employed in 1990, compared to 71.6% of white men, 66% of Asian men and 57.5% of black men. They also concluded that the education level of Latinos is increasing and that Latinos have lower rates of relying on welfare and other public assistance than the other groups, the report says.

“It’s almost an ethos,” said Hayes-Bautista, who was principal investigator for the study. “A man who would go on welfare would be called a ‘ poco hombre, ‘ not much of a man, not sufficient enough to provide for his family.”

Despite those signs of a strong work ethic, Latinos remain one of the state’s poorest ethnic groups, earning an average family income in 1990 of $26,900, contrasted with $43,400 for whites, the UCLA report says. They also had the highest percentage of families living below poverty level--22%.

An overwhelming majority of Latino men--74% of first-generation males--are blue-collar workers, and it isn’t much different for second- and third-generation ones, the report says.

“I kept telling my dad I don’t want to do this for a living, but here I am,” said Nieto’s stepson, Mike Wilson, 29, who lives in Corona and has been working steadily in drywall for seven years. “If I learn enough about the whole business (of drywall hanging), I hope some day to start a company. . . . But the way things are going, I don’t know.”

Drywall laborers have little opportunity to move up, Hinojosa said, due to their lack of skills, the prejudice of others and segregation.

Immigrant Uprisings

The discontent of these construction workers mirrors the uprisings of other immigrant labor forces. Large-scale Mexican immigration is a 30-year phenomenon, and the first signs of labor unrest among them occurred soon after its onset, with the revolt of farm workers led by the charismatic Cesar Chavez.

“In the mid ‘70s, we were seeing signs of large-scale movements, and we saw the ‘Justice for Janitors’ movement in the mid ‘80s, and now” the drywall workers, Hinojosa said.

The drywall hangers also had a short-lived strike in 1987, but that movement attracted less support and died. Donations of food and money are now helping to keep the current strikers going. Ironically, some of today’s striking immigrants helped bust another strike 10 years ago with their willingness to work for little pay and no benefits.

Immigrant labor forces generally try to work within the system first, although they are distrustful of government, Hinojosa said. But he said their complaints are mostly ignored by state labor officials, so they feel forced to take it into their own hands by striking.

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 striking drywall workers 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.”

Many whites and other ethnic groups have paid little attention to the movement, thinking that it is just one more outcropping of the recession. Others, Hayes-Bautista said, wrongly assume that most strikers are here illegally and have little sympathy.

In a neighborhood next to an Anaheim construction site where drywall hangers were arrested, many homeowners have little understanding of the demonstrations unfolding before them primarily in a foreign tongue.

“I saw the police blocking off the street and everything, but no, I didn’t know what the protesters were out there for,” said Habibh Ahmad, who recently moved into an apartment complex close to that site. “I didn’t understand what they were saying because I don’t speak Spanish.”

Others understand and empathize, though they were disturbed by the noisy protests and frightened when police arrived carrying gas masks and riot gear. Still, they see the drywall hangers largely as just one more group devastated by the recession.

“I think it’s a really bad time to start a union,” said Sally Quezada, a mother of two who lives nearby. “I mean they should be happy that they can find work because it’s hard all over and there’s a lot of people out of work.”

Hinojosa, however, said the recession, while creating a hardship for everyone in the building industry, is putting an inordinate amount of stress on lower-paid workers like drywall hangers.

Home construction, albeit slow due to the recession, is continuing in Southern California with the use of non-striking workers. Ironically, their wages have gone up, due to the depleted supply of drywall hangers willing to work, said Sato of the Newbury Park drywall company.

Builders are more upset by the sporadic violence than by the walkout, which some are certain will fail because so many people are unemployed.

“I think there’s no likelihood they’ll succeed,” developer Lightner said. “There are a lot of people out there who want to work, and the violence has kept them from feeding their families.”

Whether the strikers win or lose economically, their effort may force employers to change their perception of Latino workers, UCLA’s Hayes-Bautista said.

“I’m not sure how strong or successful the strike will be in today’s economic climate, but by organizing themselves, demanding their rights, they will strengthen their network,” he said. “Social networks are like muscles: the more you use them, the stronger they get, and we all need more of these strong family networks and work values.