Gravediggers Seek Church OK for Union

More than a hundred Southern California gravediggers and their supporters held a spirited lunch-hour rally Friday in front of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, protesting the refusal of the archdiocese to recognize their union and creating a potentially embarrassing situation for Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, an outspoken supporter of workers’ rights.

Representatives of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) said 120 of the 140 gravediggers at the archdiocese’s 10 cemeteries had signed union authorization cards and a petition requesting recognition of the union.

Cristina Vasquez, a union organizer, said the workers are seeking better wages than their current $5- to $8-per-hour rate, and a restoration of life insurance and a Christmas bonus, both of which were canceled last year, according to the union.

Angel Trevino, one of the gravediggers, said the organizing campaign began four months ago after one of the workers died and his colleagues discovered that his life insurance had been canceled and that his family would receive no death benefits.

Other members of the overwhelmingly Latino work force interviewed Friday said they were seeking formal job security protections.

The situation is particularly ticklish for Mahony, 52, who has been widely known as an activist priest for at least two decades. He has aided unionizing campaigns for farm workers and low-paid domestics, and he publicly supported an increase in California’s minimum wage last year.

The archbishop was in Rome on Friday for an official church conference, but he issued a formal statement saying he was “concerned for the legitimate needs of all employees” in the archdiocese. Mahony noted that one of his first acts after being named archbishop in 1985 was “to institute a program to improve salaries and benefits of all employees and to assure that everyone was treated fairly and justly.”

“I am, therefore, greatly surprised and distressed to learn that a number of problems and concerns still exist with respect to salaries, benefits and working conditions of employees serving in the cemeteries of the archdiocese,” Mahony said in his statement. “I believe that the workers’ concerns can be rectified, and I also recognize and support--and have often noted--the extensive teaching of the Catholic Church on the rights of workers, which always focuses upon each individual worker, and the duty of society to make certain that each worker’s rights are both recognized and protected.”

Mahony said he thought the best way to solve the problems was for him “to meet alone with representatives of the employees from the 10 cemeteries to fully ascertain their concerns.”

Union organizer Vasquez said Mahony had declined to meet with union representatives and the workers together, although he did meet with union officials and William R. Robertson, executive secretary of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO) in an unsuccessful attempt to reach a settlement.

Vasquez said the union has asked Mahony to voluntarily recognize the union on the basis that a majority of workers have signed cards saying they want union representation, but she said he refused.

In his statement Friday, Mahony said: “I will insist, if the employees truly desire to form their own association for collective bargaining purposes, that they be afforded the full protection of the National Labor Relations Act through the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board.”

“We’re willing to have an NLRB election if the issue of jurisdiction is not raised by the church, as has been done in the past,” Vasquez said, referring to the fact that when another union attempted to organize the gravediggers in 1970 the church successfully asserted that employees of nonprofit organizations such as the Catholic Church were not covered by the National Labor Relations Act.

Since that time, court decisions have held that employees of some nonprofit organizations, including workers at Catholic hospitals, were covered by the act, while others, such as employees of Catholic schools, were not. A lawyer for the NLRB said Friday that he thought the issue of whether the gravediggers would be covered is unclear.

Asked what position the church will take on jurisdiction now, Monsignor Stephen E. Blair, chancellor of the archdiocese said: “The archbishop wants to guarantee proper process. Once the NLRB receives a proper petition, we’ll cross the bridge of jurisdiction. We have not discussed that at this particular point.”

David Rosenfeld, a lawyer representing the union, said: “It is our view that the Labor Board does have jurisdiction because there is no exclusively religious purpose to the service provided by these cemeteries. And in order to expedite the matter we’ve offered to let any public agency conduct an election, so the workers can exercise a choice.”

The archdiocese operates 10 cemeteries in three Southern California counties; they are in Pomona, Culver City, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oxnard, Simi, Mission Valley, South San Gabriel, Rowland Heights and Santa Barbara. Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the archdiocese had been operating the cemeteries for decades and that they provided services to Catholics and members of their families who are non-Catholic.