500 Drywall Hangers Stage Hotel Protest : Housing: The workers, who seek to form a union, picket the Fullerton establishment where employers were meeting to discuss the walkout.

Five hundred drywall hangers who have walked off the job at housing tracts from Los Angeles to San Diego picketed a hotel Thursday where employers were meeting to discuss the 8-day-old walkout.

Carrying placards that read “We want a union” and “If we unite, we’ve won,” the men chanted in Spanish and English and marched for about an hour and a half, then dispersed shortly after noon to resume picketing job sites across Southern California.

About 70 drywall subcontractors, meanwhile, met at a Days Inn in Fullerton to discuss whether to negotiate. They left the all-day session without reaching any consensus except that they will meet again in the next two weeks.

The workers, who say they have pulled a majority of Southern California’s 4,000 drywall hangers off the job in the unusual walkout, are not represented by a union now. They are organizing themselves, they say.

Drywall, or plasterboard, forms the inner walls of houses. The material, which comes in 100-pound sheets that are half an inch thick, four feet wide and 12 feet long, are then nailed up or “hung,” then smoothed out with tape and plaster before being painted.

About 4,000 tapers are said to be less committed to the walkout but cannot work if no drywall is being hung.

The drywall companies say they are under pressure from home builders to keep their prices as low as possible in a weak housing market. Now, they say, they are being squeezed by their employees, too.

“We’re caught right in the middle,” said Bob Sato, owner of Tricon drywall company in Newbury Park and president of a small regional trade association of subcontractors, the Pacific Rim Drywallers Assn. “And the business isn’t doing too well right now, either.”

The effect of the walkout is not yet clear. Some home builders, however, say their projects have already slowed down. Some drywall companies say they are able to muster enough workers for only one job at a time; others are shut down completely, while some are still working on all of their jobs.

But the walkout definitely has the building industry worried, and there are fears that it may spread to other building trades.

The drywall hangers’ trade association met Wednesday with the home builders’ trade group, the much bigger Building Industry Assn. of Southern California. Leaders there, Sato said, told him and the other drywall hangers that the home builders will not sign a union contract.

That means the builders would be free to use non-union contractors even if most of the drywall hangers agreed to be unionized. The BIA, which has kept a low profile during the dispute, did not return phone calls Thursday.

The workers, most of them Latino, are paid four to six cents a square foot for hanging drywall; they earn, they say, an average of $200 to $300 a week at that rate, not enough to feed or house their families decently. They want twice that rate, or eight cents a square foot--the same rate, they say, that they were paid in the early 1980s.

They also want medical benefits, which most of them do not have now. And they want a union to make sure that the drywall companies do not renege on their promises as, the men say, they have done twice before when the workers walked out.

The drywall trade was unionized until the recession 10 years ago, when the home-building industry broke the unions. Wages and benefits subsequently shrank.

Hangers were in the carpenters’ union, tapers in the painters’. Now the men want both trades in one union, probably the carpenters’.

As drywall hanging became a low-paying job, the ranks of the workers were increasingly filled with Latinos, some of them illegal immigrants from Mexico who were unlikely to make waves.

Now, however, a strong core group of about 200 men from one town in central Mexico, El Maguey, says its solidarity is helping to hold the walkout together.

“And we’re all related too,” said Roy Navarro, a Fullerton drywall hanger er who was carrying a picket sign Thursday morning outside the hotel while two uniformed Fullerton police officers and several plainclothes officers watched.

The line snaked up and down a full block of an access road to the hotel.

The drywall companies complain that they have not been able to get in touch with the leaders of the walkout to discuss a settlement. The drywall hangers counter that they are ready to talk any time and accuse the companies of stalling.

Sato denied that the companies are trying to wait until the drywall hangers run out of money and must go back to work.

“We’ve tried to get them to come forward and talk to us, but they haven’t yet,” he said. “That’s our biggest problem.”

Even if a meeting is held, however, the industry is unlikely to be able to pay wages that are much higher, Sato said. Most drywall companies, he said, are barely staying afloat in this housing slump.

Some owners are willing at least to meet with the men, but some were still steadfastly opposed on Thursday, he said.

Both sides say they worry that if the walkout drags on much longer, it may lead to violence. Daily meetings of the men at the carpenters’ union hall in Orange are getting more acrimonious, participants say, as some accuse others of sneaking across picket lines.

Rumors of violence, meanwhile, are already floating across Southern California’s sprawling building community.

Sato said Thursday he has not heard a single confirmed report of someone being hurt.

“But there have been a lot of threats and a lot of intimidation,” he said. “Our people are afraid to go to work.”