Subcontractors Meet Today on Drywall Strike : Labor: Session at secret location will discuss whether to settle lawsuits by allowing workers to form union without vote.

Drywall subcontractors were to meet today at a secret location and discuss whether to settle a rash of lawsuits in return for agreeing to a union for their workers.

Hundreds of workers walked out June 1 demanding higher wages and a union. The business of hanging drywall in houses employs 4,000 in Southern California, which makes the organizing drive the

nation’s largest, union officials say.

Drywall is hung in broad sheets to form the inner walls of buildings.

The workers, most of whom are Mexican immigrants and many of whom don’t speak English, went through the 1980s without a raise. Then their pay was cut when the recession hit in 1990. The

unusual grass-roots strike, which the workers say they organized themselves, has slowed the region’s huge home-building industry for more than three months and has cost hundreds of thousands

of dollars in lost work and other expenses.

The workers say subcontractors circumvent taxes by paying workers in cash, that they use corrupt Latino “labor barons” to cheat workers and that they never pay overtime.

After the first two months of the strike, the drywall workers dropped the confrontational approach that at one point led to the mass arrest of about 150 of them. Instead, they adopted a

strategy of tying up the subcontractors in courts and at regulatory agencies. In August they began filing lawsuits asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay for allegedly

unpaid overtime.

The subcontractors say that they are victims of a cutthroat industry and that they are forced to pay low wages by unscrupulous competitors and by home builders who are not doing well in the

recession.

If the strikers get their union, there will be repercussions beyond the drywall business. Their success would probably encourage the carpenters and other unions to organize those in the

building trades, from which some unions were ejected during the 1982 recession. And it would demonstrate that poor Mexican immigrants--a large and growing segment of the region’s work

force--want unions and can be organized.

* Whether to accept a union. Unions usually organize companies by signing up enough workers to call an election. But most drywall subcontractors are so small and their employees change jobs

so often that trying to organize the industry one company at a time isn’t practical. So the strikers are demanding that the subcontractors accept the union without elections.

* Whether the larger subcontractors will unanimously agree to a union. None of them want to sign a contract only to be underbid by competitors who remain non-union and pay lower wages. A few

subcontractors favored a union from the beginning. Now they are said to be joined by others who have lost money during the summer-long strike and who worry about losing still more in legal

fees to fight lawsuits filed by the strikers. “The lawsuits have brought more people around to the idea of a union,” one subcontractor said. “We’ll find out just how many (today).”

* If the companies agree to negotiate at some point, the biggest issue is likely to be wages. The workers want 8 cents for each square foot of drywall they hang. That works out to about $600

a week before taxes. Through much of the 1980s, drywall workers averaged $400 to $500 a week. But after the recession hit two years ago, subcontractors cut pay to as little as $300 a week.

Now, however, the subcontractors are paying as much as 9 cents a square foot, or nearly $700 a week, to entice workers to cross the picket lines.

* Whether the workers would drop the lawsuits in return for subcontractors’ settling the strike. None of the 34 suits have been heard yet. But even if the strikers don’t win in court, the

subcontractors would still have to pay legal fees. The suits could easily be withdrawn, said the strikers’ lawyer, Robert A. Cantore of Los Angeles. In fact, he said, it was always clear

that filing them would help pressure the subcontractors to settle. “If the suits were dropped as part of a settlement of the strike, I’d be delighted,” he said.

Another possible point of disagreement: Many of the subcontractors don’t like the carpenters union, the strikers’ choice. The union, the subcontractors say, can be high-handed and arrogant;

some would prefer another union, perhaps the painters’. The carpenters union has assumed a low profile during the strike to avoid being sued by subcontractors. It also refused a leading role

because there are still some hard feelings from 1982, when Mexican immigrants were used to break the drywall union, which at the time was largely Anglo.