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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.
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