Unions Get a Wake-Up Call as Drywallers Achieve an Unlikely Victory

Dozens of drywall subcontractors got to the office on a cool, cloudy Monday in June to find an unpleasant surprise with the morning coffee: Their workers were on strike.

Hundreds of laborers were marching and waving placards outside the same housing subdivisions they had been working in Friday afternoon.

The workers were demanding their first raise in 10 years. Since no one was insured, they wanted health insurance too.

Most of all, though, they wanted a union.

The workers didn’t seem to have much of a chance. Many of them were here illegally, had little education and didn’t speak English. They had little help from other unions--in part because 10 years earlier the subcontractors had used these men--all Mexican immigrants--to bust the carpenters’ union.

And behind the relatively small drywall companies loomed Southern California’s multibillion-dollar home-building industry. If threatened, it could muster plenty of money, lawyers and political clout.

But now, five months later, the drywall workers have apparently won: They’ll probably sign a contract, as early as this week, with most of the large drywall subcontractors.

When they do, they will turn a page in Southern California labor history.

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The 1980s were not kind to labor unions. Membership dropped. Some, such as the air traffic controllers, got bounced from the workplace. And the federal National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, tilted away from labor under Republican presidents.

Some union officials urged their locals to get out and organize, but many were hesitant to spend the time and money. And the construction unions in particular haven’t been on the cutting edge of the labor movement anyway, tending to be conservative and closed to outsiders.

And yet here is the largest organizing drive in the nation today: The drywall business employs an estimated 4,000 drywall hangers in Southern California.

The more perceptive subcontractors realized what had happened: The immigrants had worked too many 12-hour days screwing plasterboard onto the wooden frames of houses only to be cheated out of their wages. Then last year, in the thick of the recession, the subcontractors cut wages to about $300 a week or less. Had the industry not squeezed the men so hard, it might not now have a messy revolt on its hands.

“Some of it was because the home builders were squeezing us to get our costs down,� said one subcontractor. “But part of it was greed too.�

The construction unions were not blameless, either. Even some union officials concede that they were arrogant, inflexible and should have helped out with concessions when the housing industry went in the tank in the 1981-1982 recession.

So in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southern California’s home building industry--heavily unionized since the 1950s--began kicking its unions out, including the carpenters.

The drywall workers’ benefits disappeared--vacation, pension, health insurance. But wages didn’t go down much, and the business soon attracted hundreds of Mexicans fleeing the poverty of rural Mexico. You could make $500 a week hanging drywall in Southern California, even if it was hot, hard work that eventually twisted and tortured your joints.

There were other drawbacks too. It was no secret there was a lot of corruption in the drywall industry, even by construction industry standards. When state and federal investigators cracked down on the construction industry three years ago, they picked drywall first.

Some subcontractors were notorious for paying wages in cash, thereby evading the withholding of federal and state income taxes, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation payments. They often paid the men through “labor barons,� usually other Latinos who took a cut of the wages paid to the workers whom the barons provided.

When a subcontractor underpaid him last fall, Jesus Gomez said, it was one time too many. An intense, mustachioed man, Gomez knew it’s hard to organize workers in tough times. On the other hand, he says now, the drywall workers had nothing to lose. He began to meet with other drywallers about bringing back the union.

“It was an historic event,� saidMiguel G. Caballero, legal director of the California Immigrant Workers Assn., a union-funded group in Los Angeles. “It was the first time you had this large a group of Mexican immigrants looking over their economic situation, deciding on their own without a union to walk off the job, and pull the union and the other institutions with them.

“It gives a big boost to the people in the labor movement who are arguing for more organizing.�

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When Juan Valadez came north to Orange County from the central Mexican village of El Maguey in 1963, he had no idea he’d just started a phenomenon. He found a good job hanging drywall in the suburban county’s booming housing industry. Cousins and brothers followed. By the 1980s, when the drywall work force had become almost completely Mexican, hundreds of its workers were men who had made the 1,300-mile trek from El Maguey.

Like Valadez, many have abandoned any idea of returning; they’ve bought houses and put children through college.

More Latinos have, in fact, entered the work force: By the late 1980s, 12 million people of Mexican origin alone lived in the United States. And the Mexicans who emigrated here had changed. No longer were they young single men, who most likely worked on a farm and were supporting a family in Mexico that they intended to return to.

Today, most Mexican immigrants come to this country to stay, according to a recent study by the RAND think tank in Santa Monica.

The unions were slow to catch on. They were used to seeing Mexican immigrants as potential strikebreakers; in fact, the labor movement has a history of opposing immigration, often viewing newcomers as threats to the higher-paid, more skilled native Anglo workers the unions tended to represent. And the immigrant workers were hard to organize: Many spoke only Spanish, had different customs, and--if in this country illegally--feared being deported.

Although 1.5 million, or 11%, of its 14 million members are Latino, the AFL-CIO has only one Latino on its 33-member executive board. And he was elected only last year after years of complaints.

“The drywall strike is a wake-up call to unions,� said this man, Jack Otero, a senior vice president at the Washington headquarters of the Transportation & Communication Workers Union.

“There are 8 million Hispanic workers out there,� he said. “But you’ve got to have Hispanic faces, people who speak Spanish, at all levels if you want to reach out to them.�

*

Ordinarily, a union organizes a company by collecting enough worker signatures to win an election. Then the union bargains with the employer for a contract.

Gomez and the other strike leaders realized, however, that the drywall companies are so small and so spread out over six counties that it was unrealistic to try and hold elections at each one. They decided to simply go on strike demanding a union and a contract at a single stroke. It was an old-time union tactic called a wildcat strike that’s little-used these days.

Over the summer, the men picketed each day. But as they got frustrated and short of cash, they also began vandalizing half-built houses and threatening men who continued to work.

Even though hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in from other unions, it looked like the subcontractors would merely wait out the workers. Then in August, lawyers for the strikers sued the subcontractors. They had, the lawyers alleged in the federal lawsuits, discovered an amazing fact: For years, the lawyers alleged, subcontractors had never paid hundreds of men a dime of overtime, a violation of federal labor law.

Looking at a long, costly legal battle and the prospect of having to open their financial books to the drywallers’ lawyers, the subcontractors capitulated: In October, several agreed to talk to the men about a contract.

While the strikers didn’t get everything they wanted, wages will return to about $500 a week. And they won’t go down again. And the strikers got their health insurance too.

This isn’t the first time that a union has organized a big group of Latino workers. For several years in Los Angeles, the Service Employees International Union has been organizing Los Angeles janitors in its “Justice for Janitors� campaign. It’s not even the first wildcat strike by Latino immigrants. A group of mostly Latino machinists walked out of American Racing Inc., which makes auto wheels near Compton, in 1990.

But the drywall strike is the largest and most visible such campaign so far. And it’s good news for the unions and exploited workers in other industries.

“The strike achieved celebrity status very quickly,� said Joe Shantz, national director of organizing for the AFL-CIO in Washington. “Throughout the Southwest, it’s got workers taking notice of what the drywallers did.�

But even if unions go after this new immigrant “market� of the poorest and most exploited workers, they aren’t likely to halt the long-term decline in union membership--7 million members lost in private industry in the last 20 years alone.

“What you’re seeing is what I would have to call a holocaust,� said Leo Troy, a Rutgers University professor who studies labor unions. “Compared to it, organizing activity is a spit in the ocean.�