Working Among the Dead

“Gravedigging and cemetery care is dirty and dangerous work,” noted one ACTWU pamphlet in support of the Los Angeles’ cemetery workers’ campaign. “Workers describe eye injuries, broken bones, and having to exhume bodies in unsanitary conditions.”Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, cemetery labor has long been demanding, unpredictable, and perilous. On any given day, cemetery workers might be expected to dig graves; transport and care for coffins; manage disinterments; stand atop ladders in cavernous mausoleums; and maintain cemetery grounds and gardens. The “composite nature of the cemetery worker job” has also presented risks of bodily harm to employees, from shattered bones to death on the job.Footnote ²¹ Noted one observer of such work in 1954, “the Cemetery Worker earns every dollar that is paid to him.”Footnote ²²

The “Cemetery Worker,” however, has rarely been more than an ancillary character in the numerous volumes produced on the subjects of death, dying, and cemeteries in the past half century. He (and it is most often a “he”) remains a solitary figure in the mist, both in popular culture and historical scholarship.Footnote ²³ The cemetery worker, or gravedigger, is often lost in the passive discussion of a body being laid to rest.

Yet at public and private cemeteries in Europe and North America, cemetery workers have been anything but passive. Instead, they have done the essential, if underacknowledged, work of curating and transforming necrogeographies over the past two centuries. Cemeteries, as we know them today, debuted in Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century as secular and hygienic alternatives to overcrowded churchyards.Footnote ²⁴ Beginning with the 1804 opening of Pére-Lachaise in Paris and, in 1831, Mount Auburn in Boston, a “new regime” of the dead emerged.Footnote ²⁵ “Cemeteries [became] parks,” writes Thomas W. Laqueur, “adapted to accommodating diverse thousands…of the dead in various degrees of commemorative splendor or oblivion.”Footnote ²⁶ By the late nineteenth century, these park-like, “rural” cemeteries had spread across the United States, most of which were under the care of a professional superintendent and a growing workforce.Footnote ²⁷ Into the twentieth century, an updated, more profit-conscious form of necrogeography emerged: the “memorial park,” known for its flat, often bronze, memorial markers and sprawling lawns.Footnote ²⁸ Newer cemeteries, like the iconic Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles County (founded in 1913), made death “peaceful and poetic,” embraced patriotic and Christian symbolism, and promoted mausoleum burials, tactics that proved to be wildly profitable.Footnote ²⁹ Forest Lawn, for example, sold over $7 million in services in 1959 alone.Footnote ³⁰

In the post-World War II era, the expansion and modernization of the cemetery brought its commodification and corporatization. Undertakers, funeral directors, and cemetery owners sold what Mitford derided as an “American way of death,” replete with pre-need sales packages, luxurious caskets, complicated embalming procedures, and pricey gravesite real estate.Footnote ³¹ Those in the cemetery business saw their work as just that—a business. “We are manufacturers,” noted one cemetery director in 1944. “Instead of coke, slag, pig-iron, etc., we take ground, fertilizer, seed, shrubs, trees, flowers, water, stones, top dressing, etc. and with equipment and men we manufacture a ‘product’ known as a cemetery. Then we divide this product into individual lots—‘packages’—and there you have it.”Footnote ³² Though religious leaders and clergy bemoaned the commodification of grief, sectarian cemeteries also evolved throughout the twentieth century. In order to compete with the aggressive marketing approaches of secular cemeteries and maintain eschatological authority, religious cemeteries formed national associations and tentatively embraced newer trends in mortuary rituals, from ornate caskets to cremation in the 1960s.Footnote ³³

At most cemeteries, a small crew of workers helped to make this “product” attractive and profitable, handling burials as well as grounds maintenance. Work was at its busiest in summer months, but laborers kept active in the winter with patching, repair, or other “ambitious” construction projects.Footnote ³⁴ For the most part—and especially at sectarian cemeteries—workers were recent immigrants, often laboring within the ethnic parishes that made up their faith and immigrant communities. This work was communal, linked to their spiritual practices, and seen to be a first, temporary job upon arrival in the United States, though many stayed in the occupation for decades.Footnote ³⁵

As the industry evolved, so too did workers’ daily responsibilities. Expansion and modernization brought speed-ups, reduced pay, and threats to their job security. For example, as cemeteries featured expansive lawns with flush monuments, grounds maintenance changed. More mowing could be done with less manpower. And though the need for freshly-dug graves did not disappear, this work was also changing, thanks to the invention of the mechanical backhoe in the late 1940s. Cemetery owners widely adopted this new technology by the 1950s.Footnote ³⁶ These machines could reduce the amount of digging time, noted one report, from seven hours to forty-five minutes; only one man and an assistant were needed to operate the backhoe.Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, cemetery work also shifted to mausoleums and vaults, popular features of memorial park cemeteries.Footnote ³⁸ Here, workers often handled heavy—and poorly designed—vaults, which often caved in, requiring disinterment of bodies.Footnote ³⁹ This, noted one union official, made for “a nasty job and a needless one.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Facing rapidly evolving working conditions, alongside wage stagnation, many American cemetery workers turned to organized labor. The late 1940s proved to be prime years for organizing in the industry. One union in Chicago led the way: Local 106 of the Building and Service Employees International Union (BSEIU). A youthful organizer, Miles E. Barry, chartered the union in 1943 and secured contracts that year for three local Catholic cemeteries, St. Mary, St. Joseph, and St. Boniface. Within one year, Local 106 boasted that workers at forty-three out of fifty local cemeteries had signed union membership cards.Footnote ⁴¹ By 1949, all Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular “cemeteries in the Chicago metropolitan area had been 100% organized.”Footnote ⁴² Such wall-to-wall organizing—which extended into funeral homes (including Black-owned establishments), vault production facilities, and burial garment companies—produced impressive contracts that boosted wages, improved working conditions and benefits, and guaranteed a forty-hour work week.Footnote ⁴³ Local 106’s example spread to other urban areas such as New York City, Minneapolis, Oakland, and San Francisco.Footnote ⁴⁴

For cemetery workers and their unions, most benefits and wage increases were not given but, rather, won through regular—and often tense—strikes. Local 106, for example, would strike cemeteries (along denominational or secular groupings) eleven times between 1943 and 1992.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the Bay Area in northern California, BSEIU Locals 265 and 322 launched joint strikes nearly half a dozen times between the unions’ 1948 charters and 1988.Footnote ⁴⁶ And in New York City, members of BSEIU Local 365 walked off the job thirteen times between 1949 and 1999.Footnote ⁴⁷ Each time these unions struck, the general public felt it acutely: funeral processions had to weave through picket lines, burials were delayed, and bodies piled up in cemetery cold storage.

Because of the frequency of these strikes—and the landscape of grief on which they played out—the public, cemetery owners and religious leaders, and workers themselves increasingly debated the nature and meaning of cemetery labor. All parties agreed that this work was essential and sensitive. Workers thus demanded appropriate compensation, safe working conditions, and “dignity and respect” on the job, especially as they engaged in what they saw as their “moral and sacred obligation” to help bury the dead.Footnote ⁴⁸ Cemetery owners and consumers, by contrast, saw that sacred obligation as exempting these workers from strikes and third-party union contracts.

Two bitter strikes underscore the thorny moral (and theological) questions that cemetery workers’ activism posed, particularly for Catholic cemeteries. The first, what one Catholic labor leader called “the most memorable labor dispute in the history of U.S. church-related institutions,” began in New York City in January 1949 when 300 unionized cemetery workers went on strike against the Catholic Archdiocese.Footnote ⁴⁹ After three months and over 1,000 delayed burials, Cardinal Francis Spellman broke the strike by hiring seminarians as temporary replacement workers.Footnote ⁵⁰ Throughout the conflict, Cardinal Spellman insisted that cemetery workers were not “regular” workers but, rather, engaged in “a religious service”—the “corporal works of mercy”—that fell outside of labor law. Here, eschatology enabled union-busting.Footnote ⁵¹ Over two decades later, in 1971, consumers echoed Cardinal Spellman’s sentiment during a five-month long strike in the San Francisco Bay Area.Footnote ⁵² Even in a union-friendly region, public opinion sided with cemetery owners and the bereaved, with observers deeming pickets “disgraceful.”Footnote ⁵³ As the strike dragged on for months, a “cortege” of forty-one mourners made their way to the state capitol to beg Governor Ronald Reagan for intervention. “FOR GOD’S SAKE LET US BURY OUR DEAD,” read a placard on the mourners’ bus.Footnote ⁵⁴ Within days, the cemetery workers’ unions—BSEIU Locals 265 and 322—signed agreements with cemeteries, cowed by public outcry and political pressure.Footnote ⁵⁵

By the 1970s and 1980s, disputes throughout the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom, played out similarly, with cemetery workers’ struggles cast as betrayals (rather than affirmations) of their sacred roles. Their activism rendered them scapegoats and symbols of organized labor’s overreach.Footnote ⁵⁶ As one “FED UP” Bronx resident wrote to the Daily News in 1974, “the American people will someday be put in their graves by strikes. That is, if the undertakers and gravediggers are not on strike.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Organizing Among the Dead in Los Angeles

Cemetery workers in the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles faced many of the same working conditions and challenges as their Chicago, New York, and Bay Area counterparts—though they labored without a union contract. Spread across three counties and ten (later eleven) cemeteries, 140 men worked in small, tight-knit crews. Regardless of the cemetery for which they worked, these men shared a few common characteristics: they were overwhelmingly immigrants from Mexico and Central America, with most having arrived in the United States in the 1970s and, since then, had given at least ten years of service to the Archdiocese. Most were faithful Catholic parishioners, framing their employment as “pastoral and spiritual” in nature.Footnote ⁵⁸ Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles, for example, employed twenty-eight groundskeepers and grave diggers; among them were some stalwart old-timers, like Zacarias Gonzalez, who began working at the cemetery in the early 1960s, and Hilario Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant with thirteen years of service by 1988.Footnote ⁵⁹ Gonzalez, Ramirez, and others were expected to not only facilitate interments and maintain grounds but also “sometimes serve as acolytes at [daily] Mass.”Footnote ⁶⁰

From Calvary to Santa Clara Cemetery in Oxnard, cemetery workers also shared a long list of grievances against the Archdiocese. First, there was the pay. “These workers make extremely poor wages,” noted ACTWU’s Dolly Flores.Footnote ⁶¹ José Aranda at Calvary, for example, noted that in spite of his twelve years on the job, he had been passed over repeatedly for a raise. In 1988, he still made only $5.75 an hour (by contrast, unionized cemetery workers in the Diocese of Oakland earned between $7 and $14).Footnote ⁶² To make matters worse, Aranda and his coworkers never received their annual Christmas bonus in 1987, something ACTWU later argued was because the “Church needed the money to pay for the Pope’s September 1987 visit to Los Angeles.”Footnote ⁶³

Second, workers cited years of unsafe working conditions and inadequate medical coverage. Renando Flores, who had been in cemetery work for twenty-six years, once fell from a sixteen-foot mausoleum ladder, breaking both legs. He had to pay for most of his own medical care and was left without feeling in his toes. The strain of this work could even kill older workers. Gustavo Molina, for example, noted that one of his first work partners, a man named Guadalupe Olivar, collapsed, and later died, while trimming hedges.Footnote ⁶⁴ And in the spring of 1988, another cemetery worker died on the job, after which his colleagues learned that their “life insurance had been cancelled and that [the] family [of the deceased] would receive no death benefits.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Angry and grieving, cemetery workers were ready to take collective action. In the “urban laboratory” of Los Angeles—home to many unions (but no secular cemetery workers’ local) and the site of burgeoning immigrant advocacy and vibrant hometown associations—these men relied first on their connections as immigrants to seek out union representation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Notably, they returned to a space that had proven instrumental in assisting immigrants in the work of adjusting their status under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA): ACTWU’s meeting hall, food bank, and offices in downtown Los Angeles. As Ernesto Medrano recalled, “this whole [cemetery] campaign kind of was an offshoot” of the Labor Immigrant Assistance Project (LIAP), in which local union halls became intake centers for immigrants (and would-be union members). Drawn back to ACTWU’s headquarters through their familiarity with the union and their desire for change, cemetery workers connected with two of the union’s lead organizers.Footnote ⁶⁷ The first, Barbara Mejia, had worked her way up in the union’s Southern California organizing staff and leadership, becoming the manager of the union’s California Joint Board by 1987.Footnote ⁶⁸ The second, Cristina Vásquez, an Ecuadorian immigrant, began her tenure in Los Angeles’ labor movement as a garment worker. After her non-union shop went on strike in 1976, she joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) as an organizer. By the 1980s, she had moved to ACTWU, doing similar organizing among garment and other low-wage immigrant workers.Footnote ⁶⁹

In their organizing work, Mejia and Vásquez embodied—and challenged—the shifting priorities of Los Angeles’s labor movement and, more specifically, ACTWU, in the 1970s and 1980s. ACTWU itself was born in 1976 through the merger of two garment workers’ unions: the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Both had long histories of radical organizing among garment workers in the Northeast and, later, in the American South and Sunbelt as manufacturers moved away from union strongholds.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the 1970s, both launched innovative and multiracial boycott campaigns against anti-union employers. First was ACWA’s 1972 to 1974 boycott of Farah Manufacturing Company (clothing) in support of Latina workers in the United States-Mexico borderlands. This was followed by TWUA’s efforts to organize multiracial workers with the anti-union firm J.P. Stevens, which ACTWU turned into a nationwide boycott and corporate campaign from 1976 to 1980.Footnote ⁷¹ As ACTWU staff organizer David Werlin later recalled, the union was “trying to be on the cutting edge of organizing,” particularly though grassroots organizing campaigns that engaged immigrants and low-wage workers of color.Footnote ⁷²

Organizers like Mejia and Vásquez were right at this “cutting edge” in Los Angeles, reaching out to Spanish-speaking and immigrant workers, organizing at the grassroots, and working creatively to expand the union’s membership base beyond the garment industry.Footnote ⁷³ And so, when Hilario Ramirez and other cemetery workers showed up at ACTWU’s union hall looking for help, Mejia and Vásquez jumped on board. In the spring and summer of 1988, they launched a card-check campaign, going cemetery to cemetery distributing union cards.Footnote ⁷⁴ By June, 120 out of 140 cemetery workers had signed on to the campaign.Footnote ⁷⁵

On July 1, with a stack of cards in hand, Mejia and other Los Angeles labor officials, like William R. Robertson of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, met with the archbishop and asked him to recognize the union.Footnote ⁷⁶ Mahony, however, declined to take such a step, regarding the card-check campaign as borne of “peer pressure.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Though he affirmed workers’ rights to a union, he insisted that he preferred to “meet alone with representatives of the employees…to fully ascertain their concerns.”Footnote ⁷⁸ One week later, cemetery workers, ACTWU representatives, and allies amplified their demand for recognition, putting up a picket line around the Archdiocesan chancery office in downtown Los Angeles (Figure 1). Bilingual placards insisted that “Nuestros Intereses Son Justos” (“Our interests are just”) and that workers only wanted a “peaceful agreement.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Figure 1.

Cemetery workers and their allies march in support of the union campaign, circa 1988. This image was featured on the front fold of an ACTWU pamphlet in support of the cemetery workers’ fight. folder 7, box 118, Rodolfo F. Acuña Collection, Special Collections and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA.

Though Mahony himself was in Rome at the time of the picket, he issued a carefully worded response that once again rejected ACTWU’s card-check campaign and emphasized his concern for “the legitimate needs of all employees,” which “flows both from the Gospels and from the social teachings of the Church.” However, he believed that “the best approach is a collaborative one directly between the workers and the Archdiocese.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The archbishop’s contradictory position echoed that of Cardinal Spellman during the infamous 1949 cemetery strike in New York City. While Mahony affirmed his long-standing support for labor and aligned with over a century of papal encyclicals supporting individual workers’ rights to form associations, he believed that cemetery workers’ religious duties rendered them outside of federal labor law.Footnote ⁸¹ To test this theory and defer action, the archbishop sent the case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), asking it to decide whether these workers, as employees of a religious institution, had the right to unionize.Footnote ⁸²

As the NLRB considered Mahony’s request, Catholic Angelenos eagerly anticipated that year’s Labor Day Mass and Breakfast, an event at which the archbishop and ACTWU organizers would surely encounter one another. Its host, the CLI, was a storied Los Angeles institution that embodied both the teachings of labor-minded papal encyclicals and the historically warm relationship between labor and the Church. Founded in 1947, its mission was to provide spiritual and educational opportunities for the city’s working-class Catholics, prevent the spread of communism in organized labor, and promote labor-management harmony.Footnote ⁸³ By the 1980s, the CLI had established itself as an active space for collaboration and political activism. Its advisory board reflected this, expanding to include representatives from ACTWU, State Building and Construction Trades, local clergy, and Catholic rank-and-file union members, for example.Footnote ⁸⁴ “It was a cherished institution,” remembered Dave Sickler. “Everybody loved it.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In 1988, CLI director Patrick W. Henning and his staff prepared carefully for the annual gathering, hoping to avoid any awkward standoffs over the Catholic cemeteries issue. Notably, Henning demanded assurances that ACTWU and cemetery workers would do nothing more than wear the aforementioned buttons; there were to be “no demonstrations” and “no handbilling during the breakfast.” Added Henning in a phone call with Mejia, “I [will] hold you and the union responsible for any disruption at all.”Footnote ⁸⁶ For the most part, the Mass and Breakfast went off without a hitch. Though Mahony would later recall the event with anger, his initial reaction was one of “sincere gratitude.” In an initial thank you note to Henning, Mahony commented that “everything worked out very well considering the slight difficulty which was always before us.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Though this friendly correspondence would sour as the “difficulty” dragged on, relations between the CLI, labor, and the Church seemed relatively calm as summer turned to fall.

One month later, the NLRB announced its decision, siding with the Archdiocese and dismissing the cemetery workers’ case as outside of its jurisdiction.Footnote ⁸⁸ Deeming “cemetery operations [as] integral to the Catholic Church’s religious mission and rituals,” Regional Director Victoria E. Aguayo classified cemetery workers as religious employees.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this determination, Aguayo extended the 1979 Supreme Court ruling that held that Catholic school teachers—regardless of whether they taught religious or secular content—were unprotected by the National Labor Relations Act.Footnote ⁹⁰ ACTWU expected such a decision. Unphased and undeterred, Mejia promptly sent a letter to the archbishop, requesting a secret ballot election nonetheless.Footnote ⁹¹ “I want these workers to have an opportunity to vote,” she insisted.Footnote ⁹² Mahony agreed, emphasizing his support for workers’ choice in the matter. An election, to be overseen by the state’s Mediation and Conciliation Service, was thus tentatively scheduled for mid-January 1989.Footnote ⁹³

With an election date set, ACTWU’s organizing team, led by Mejia and Vásquez, who were joined by two younger organizers, Berta Silva and David Werlin (both of whom were assigned to the campaign because they could speak Spanish), got to work.Footnote ⁹⁴ “This was worker-led, [so] we would just…go around and try and keep them connected,” remembered Werlin.Footnote ⁹⁵ At the same time, the Archdiocese made moves to undermine workers’ support of the union. Mahony reportedly raised workers’ wages and “fired a supervisor who…mistreated workers.” He brought on a notorious union-buster and labor lawyer, Carlos Restrepo, who repeated standard anti-union messaging about unions as corrupt, third-party meddlers and often told workers that a vote for the union was a “vote against God.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The Archdiocese also stalled, with officials announcing that they would delay the vote by a month (to February 8, 1989) because of reports of “misconduct by Union organizers including threats, vandalism and trespassing by Union supporters.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Many workers, resolute in their support for the union, bristled at this delay. Said Juan Treviño at Resurrection Cemetery in Monterey Park (a suburb in east Los Angeles County), “as good Christians, we trust the word of…Mahony, but with these kinds of action, we see that he is only trying to deceive us.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Tensions between Mahony and labor officials continued to grow as the election approached. Just one day before the vote, Mahony wrote Henning at the CLI to end his involvement with the Labor Day Breakfast. “I have been shocked and scandalized,” he noted, “by the tactics of the ACTWU labor organization.” In the letter, he cited the prior year’s button-wearing action (calling it “unacceptable” and anti-Catholic) and, in a bit of not-so-subtle race-baiting, accused union members of affiliating with gangs. Mahony also threatened to investigate the CLI itself for its links to ACTWU.Footnote ⁹⁹ Mejia, for her part, later “vociferously denied the contention about intimidation and said the archdiocese had presented no formal charges to the union.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In this acrimonious environment, cemetery workers went to the polls. On February 8, at ten cemeteries, workers voted during their lunch breaks; ballots were counted later at a centrally located “church facility agreed upon by both partners.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The results tilted narrowly in ACTWU’s favor, with 66 voting for union representation and 62 against. Mahony, however, refused to recognize these results, citing his earlier allegations of possible “gang connections.”Footnote ¹⁰² Demanding review of the election results, Mahony triggered a clause in the election agreement that would bring the dispute before a neutral arbitrator. In this case, a three-member review panel—with one member chosen by the union (Dave Sickler), another by the Archdiocese (Ralph Kennedy), and a third “neutral” member (Fred Alvarez)—was convened.Footnote ¹⁰³

With this additional delay, the cemetery workers’ campaign began to capture a broader audience in labor, progressive, and Catholic circles in Los Angeles and the nation. Warned Harry Weinstein, a labor writer for the Los Angeles Times, this “small organizing battle could escalate into a much broader dispute, which could rupture relations between the archdiocese and organized labor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even the National Catholic Reporter carried news of the dispute, describing it as “a long and acrimonious campaign in which Mahony, previously viewed as pro-labor, was repeatedly criticized for opposing the effort.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Notably, media coverage, which portrayed the battle as a proxy for strained Catholic-labor relations nationally, often took a paternalistic view of the workers themselves, casting them as an unnamed mass of victims in need of salvation by either Church leaders or labor organizers.

The archbishop also took a paternalistic tone in his opposition to the union, casting himself as the defender of his immigrant employees against “hostile, strident and confrontational” ACTWU campaign. On April 7, he took his views to the pages of Tidings, laying out steps he would take to improve working conditions within the Archdiocese. Acknowledging the significant rise in the number of lay, or non-religious, employees in the Church locally and nationwide (from housekeepers to teachers), Mahony announced new employee initiatives, such as a personnel handbook and the establishment of “Employee Councils.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

As Mahony publicly affirmed “our duty to help provide justice for all Church employees,” he continued to racialize pro-union workers like Juan Treviño at Resurrection, José Aranda at Calvary, and Zacarias Gonzalez, also at Calvary, as criminal outsiders. The day after publishing his Tidings piece, the archbishop authorized the firing of these three “for conduct that is inconsistent with the work and mission of the sacred ministry of Catholic cemeteries,” which included reportedly “threatening or intimidating…other workers.” Said Gonzalez, age 61, “I have done nothing wrong. I’ve been working there so many years.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Two days later, he joined ACTWU and his colleagues in a protest at the chancery office, chanting “queremos un contrato ahora!” (“We want a contract now!”).Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Over the next few months, the cemetery workers’ demands remained unmet. Two workers reportedly traveled to the Vatican to plead their case.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Mahony briefly threw his support behind an anti-union state bill, to the dismay of organized labor in the city and beyond.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Meanwhile, the three members of the independent review panel held public hearings and met intermittently to review the disputed election results and allegations of “gang activity” and harassment.Footnote ¹¹¹

At Catholic cemeteries across southern California, hopeful union members continued to work, never going so far as to strike. In the broader national context of tense strikes (especially at Catholic cemeteries), ACTWU organizers approached the idea of a walkout with extreme trepidation. “There was a lot of talk and…concern” about taking such a step, recalled Werlin. The president of BSEIU Local 265 (representing cemetery workers in the Bay Area), José Valdez, even visited Archdiocesan workers to offer support and discuss potential strike tactics.Footnote ¹¹² Even so, ACTWU decided against a strike, worried of its impact on “public image.”Footnote ¹¹³ Instead, workers and organizers waited, hoping for a positive decision from the arbitration panel.

That decision finally came in November.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Though the panel’s report acknowledged instances of “crude language and behavior” among some pro-union workers, its members argued that such behavior “did not materially affect the results of the election.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The panel upheld ACTWU’s victory, deeming it the bargaining agent for cemetery workers. Organizers began preparing for contract negotiations, hopeful that this third-party decision would offer a “new slate.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In a letter to Mahony, Mejia acknowledged that “certainly this has been a very difficult time for all of us…I believe it is important for us now to move together.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

But as had become standard in this “acrimonious struggle,” the Archdiocese reacted with indignation and inconsistent messaging. While one representative, Monsignor Stephen E. Blaire, assured the press that he and others would begin contract negotiations with ACTWU, the archbishop announced he would “refuse to meet with them (union representatives) because I simply cannot accept their conduct.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In a nine-minute, pre-taped bilingual address played at every Archdiocesan cemetery, Mahony argued that a “recent anonymous poll” showed that most workers actually rejected ACTWU and reminded his audience that they were under no obligation to pay union dues.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As cemetery officials visited each cemetery to play Mahony’s message, they also collected workers’ signatures on petitions denouncing the panel’s decision. Letters from workers at Holy Cross, Calvary, Queen of Heaven, All Souls, and Resurrection cemeteries, for example, all used the same language, thanking Mahony for “defending our rights,” describing news of the panel’s decision as “strange,” and arguing that they no longer wanted union representation.Footnote ¹²⁰

With this, the archbishop launched a counternarrative that simultaneously questioned the authority of the independent panel and cast himself as a protector of workers who “want nothing to do with the union.”Footnote ¹²¹ In particular, he interpreted employees’ petitions as indisputable evidence of their rejection of ACTWU’s representation. On December 4, 1989, he wrote Mejia to inform her that “many of our Catholic cemetery workers are now expressing to me both verbally and in writing their resistance to any participation in your labor union,” adding that his “primary concern is for the welfare of our employees and their families.”Footnote ¹²²

Over a month later—on the eve of the expiration of the first election’s results—the Archdiocese informed ACTWU that they were calling for a new vote.Footnote ¹²³ Mejia was furious, deeming the much-cited worker petitions fraudulent and threatening to take the Church to court.Footnote ¹²⁴ A few days later, in support of the archbishop’s decision to hold a second election, nearly fifty cemetery workers marched outside of the chancery office, hoisting signs that read “We Support the Archbishop.” Said one worker, Abel Hidalgo from Holy Cross in Culver City, the archbishop had provided better wages, benefits, and working conditions for cemetery workers, alleviating any need for a union. “I feel that we have a voice with the Archbishop. We have been working with him for one and a half years and he listens to us when it is necessary,” noted Hidalgo.Footnote ¹²⁵ Such comments, bolstered by the physical presence of pro-Mahony pickets, underscore not only the divisive nature of ACTWU’s campaign but also the Archdiocese’s ability to capitalize on a close, spiritual relationship with its Catholic workers, as well as the year-long delay in negotiations.

Mejia and ACTWU organizers, for their part, swiftly filed suit against the Archdiocese and Mahony for breach of contract, arguing that they had been legally bound to bargain for a year after the Election Committee’s decision.Footnote ¹²⁶ At a press conference announcing the suit, Sickler noted he was “absolutely outraged” by Mahony’s behavior. Even so, the Archdiocese proceeded with its own hastily-called election, which left little time for ACTWU organizers to prepare.Footnote ¹²⁷ On February 9, 1990 (one year and a day after the first election), workers voted 92-24 to reject the union as their representative. “The vote means cemetery workers wish to continue to work directly with Archbishop Roger Mahony,” affirmed Tidings.Footnote ¹²⁸

With these results, this bitter fight moved to a new, albeit final, phase, which played out in Los Angeles’ Superior Court for another year and a half.Footnote ¹²⁹ ACTWU not only pursued its publicly-announced breach of contract case, it also sought damages on behalf of the three workers fired in 1989, Treviño, Aranda, and Gonzalez. This was a costly endeavor for the union, which admittedly did not have the funds to cover the “tremendous amount of legal expenses” incurred.Footnote ¹³⁰ Mejia worried constantly about legal bills, writing ACTWU President Jacob Sheinkman that the situation was “becoming extremely embarrassing.”Footnote ¹³¹ To expedite the process, the union eventually agreed to out-of-court settlements in both cases. In March 1991, ACTWU secured backpay for the fired employees—though none of them would be able to return to work for the Archdiocese. As part of this agreement, ACTWU and the Archdiocese also began discussing joint programs on behalf of workers, ranging from drug education to English courses, and possible steps towards another election.Footnote ¹³²

The breach of contract suit still needed to be settled, and negotiations stretched on into the summer of 1991, during which time Mejia’s correspondence took on an increasingly pessimistic tone. Given the legal costs incurred over the course of this campaign and because of Mahony’s “volatility,” she wrote Sheinkman: “I have been thinking about turning this to another union if we can get the Archdiocese to agree to immediate recognition and bargaining, for the best interest of the Union and the workers…”Footnote ¹³³

In the end, the Archdiocese did not agree to recognition, but ACTWU got one last shot at a fair election. As part of a final settlement, Superior Court Judge Victor E. Chavez ordered a third, and final, vote for October 22, 1991.Footnote ¹³⁴ “The most optimistic thing union official Barbara Mejia will say,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “is that the union has a 50-50 chance.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Mahony—now Cardinal—was much more optimistic. In a recorded speech played at each cemetery, he promised that although union organizers might harass workers again, he would protect them.Footnote ¹³⁶ As a show of his unwavering defense of his workers, Mahony hosted cemetery workers and their families at a picnic at Cantwell Sacred Heart High School. “At the time the Holy Father appointed me Cardinal,” affirmed Mahony, “he said that as he did so the honor was not just for me but for all of you, especially those of you so directly involved with me through your apostolic work and ministry.” Affirming not only workers’ religious duties but also their special place in his flock, the cardinal continued to argue that a union would only interfere with this sacred employer-employee relationship.Footnote ¹³⁷

On the other side of the campaign, ACTWU—drained of funding and resources after years of organizing and legal battles—turned to the AFL-CIO for support. Sickler called in more Spanish-speaking organizers, among them Ernesto Medrano, to conduct house visits and on-site organizing in the weeks leading up to the October 1991 election.Footnote ¹³⁸ Yet, as was largely expected, the union lost this third bid—by a vote of 92 against the union and 43 for it.Footnote ¹³⁹ For Mahony, this was an emphatic statement of workers’ wish to “continue their collaborative effort” with the Archdiocese.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Mejia and others accepted the results with sadness, noting that it was never a fair fight, given the cardinal’s “unfair tactics,” delays, and privileged access to these workers, as well as the union’s own limited resources.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Reflecting on the campaign, Mejia penned thank you notes to union leaders and volunteer organizers, acknowledging their “efforts in uniting the labor community in Los Angeles…behind the Catholic Cemetery Workers.”Footnote ¹⁴²

Challenges & Opportunities: Catholic Work & Labor’s Future

In spite of its disappointing conclusion, the cemetery workers’ campaign made a distinctive imprint on the city’s labor movement. From the earliest days of chancery office picket lines, labor allies viewed the gravediggers’ struggle as righteous, “brilliant,” and “courageous,” often using language that bordered on dismissive paternalism.Footnote ¹⁴³ For labor activists, this was an inspiring story of hot-shop, David-and-Goliath organizing outside of union strongholds. Cemetery workers thus joined SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign, ILGWU’s organizing efforts in small garment and manufacturing shops, and immigrant drywallers’ bottom-up drives in the early 1990s to offer resounding challenges to the belief among some in labor that low-wage, immigrant workers were unorganizable.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Thanks to strong community networks, union and worker determination, and creative organizing strategies, as sociologist Héctor L. Delgado argued in 1993, such campaigns offered hope for a labor movement that was “on the ropes, bruised and fighting back sporadically.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Yet even if cemetery workers could be mostly organized, a union contract remained out of reach. This shortfall is instructive, illuminating not only the practical challenges of unionizing in the cemetery industry but also broader shifts in the demographics, conditions, and organizability of Catholic workplaces in this period.

Practically speaking, budgetary and logistical organizing challenges proved insurmountable for ACTWU in the cemetery campaign. First, the union’s constant financial troubles made it difficult to navigate a geographically divided bargaining unit (an Archdiocesan cemetery system stretching across three counties) and to push back against the cardinal’s repeated and successful tactics to delay elections. ACTWU’s lack of experience in organizing cemetery workers and local organizers’ decision to avoid a strike may have also handicapped their efforts.

The religious nature of Catholic cemetery work additionally presented unique practical and legal challenges to organizing efforts. The union, argued Cardinal Mahony, “simply miscalculated…the factor that Faith plays in” this line of work—and in workers’ relationship with their employer and spiritual leader.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Mahony was not wrong. Indeed, many cemetery workers, whether toiling at Catholic or secular institutions, framed their work in this way: as a satisfying, meaningful, if underpaid, vocation.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Mahony’s close communication with these workers emphasized this understanding of their labors as essential to the pastoral “mission of the church.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Though labor advocates saw this as a manipulation of workers’ spirituality—using it “against their general welfare”—the cardinal spoke to the tenets of service and faith that animated so many cemetery workers.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

These entanglements of work, faith, and mission also shaped legal interpretations of (and obstacles to) workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain in religious work settings. Since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago et al. (1979), employees at religious institutions found themselves outside of the bounds of national labor law. In this precedent-setting case, teachers at seven Catholic high schools in the Chicago and Fort Wayne-South Bend (Indiana) dioceses had filed for representation elections—and won. The schools challenged the NLRB’s decisions and their appeal made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Board never had authority over religious employees, thus sidestepping “thorny First Amendment questions of free exercise of religion and separation of church and state,” as legal scholars David L. Gregory and Charles J. Russo later wrote.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In 1988, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles relied on this precedent to avoid federal intervention in the cemetery workers’ case.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Without NLRB jurisdiction, ACTWU thus relied on California’s state mediation services and had little recourse to challenge the Archdiocese’s unfair labor practices (chief among them captive-audience meetings and dismissals of employees active in the union).

Despite the limitations created by the NLRB’s rulings, organizing efforts at religious—particularly Catholic—institutions were actually on the rise in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In this period, Church-run cemeteries like those in Los Angeles, hospitals, and schools became laboratories of labor organizing, exposing growing fractures between labor and Catholic leaders and, as well, offering new opportunities for building labor power and forging progressive alliances at close of the twentieth century.

Much of this shift stemmed from the overall decline in the population of clergy and religious women. By one estimate, in 1970, “4.6 percent of priests aged 29-34 were resigning annually.” Thousands of religious women were similarly leaving their orders, with the number of women religious dropping by 48.8 percent between 1964 and 1989.Footnote ¹⁵² This exodus left archdiocesan and parish officials—and in particular, parochial schools—with few options but to hire lay workers to fill the gap. “Some 25 years ago,” acknowledged Mahony in a 1989 statement about cemetery workers’ campaign, “almost 85 percent of those in full-time work for the Church were Religious men or women, or priests. Many of our lay employees were part-time, and vast numbers were volunteers. Today, the opposite is true. Almost 85 percent of the Church’s employees are lay men and women, with only 15 percent Religious or priests.”Footnote ¹⁵³ With this reversal, the role of the Church as boss was under new scrutiny.

Lay employees contested the Church’s employment practices and pay structures—and organized labor saw great opportunity in this growing labor market. Indeed, in 1973, one study found that 25 dioceses (out of 145) in the United States “reported the existence of unions” at Catholic parochial schools.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Many employees began organizing in the context of post-Vatican II challenges to traditional Catholic hierarchies, which opened the way for lay initiative and activist clergy.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Union-inclined employees also challenged austerity measures adopted by many urban (and rural) parishes as communicants moved to suburbs, leaving pews and collection baskets equally empty.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In this context, lay teachers and healthcare workers at Catholic hospitals, in particular, sought better pay and greater autonomy over their work and launched a veritable wave of organizing in these sectors by the century’s end. In 1999, for example, union votes were scheduled at nearly a dozen Catholic-run hospitals from Florida to California.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

These organizing campaigns often became “nasty battle[s] of wills” between Catholic leadership and organized labor.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ “Clearly,” noted one study, “Church leaders neither want to, nor should they have to, relinquish either their essential beliefs or fundamental managerial rights through collective bargaining.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Added Sister Barbara Pfarr with the Religious’ Employers’ Project of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, “This has been a black eye in the Catholic church for decades…For all of our social teachings, we are terrible employers.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Archdiocesan cemetery workers in Los Angeles thus joined what Sr. Pfarr called “a long history of terrible tension between religious employers and organized labor.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ The tensions born of the cemetery workers’ campaign sowed deep divisions and resentments between Los Angeles’s labor movement and the Archdiocese, with the closure of the storied CLI as collateral damage. Yet given both labor and the Church’s close ties with working-class Latino immigrants, these divisions proved reparable. As SEIU Vice President Eliseo Medina later noted, “the people that we see at work during the week, they [church leaders] see on Sunday.” By the late 1990s, labor leaders and Cardinal Mahony thus worked to put “behind us the issue of the cemetery workers and the divisions that that had created,” recalled Medina.Footnote ¹⁶² The key terrain for tentative collaboration and goodwill was immigrant rights, with Mahony publicly marching alongside labor leaders and openly defying immigration laws.Footnote ¹⁶³

By the early 2000s, gone was the CLI’s Labor Day Breakfast, the site of many years of conviviality (as well as moments of silent, button-clad protest). In its stead emerged exuberant, interracial, coalition-backed May Day marches, as seen most pointedly in 2006 when nearly one million Angelenos—with labor, clergy, and other allies among them—turned out to demand legalization and protest draconian anti-immigrant laws.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ This shift highlights important transformations in labor and social movement history, key among them the rise of immigrant-led unions, new opportunities for organizing lay Church workers, and remade and revitalized labor and interfaith coalitions. As historical scholarship on this period grows, we would do well to consider seriously these developments and their implications for labor, faith politics, and the culture wars in the United States.

Afterlives: Cemetery Work in the Twenty-First Century

Amid these transformations, there were still graves to dig and grounds to maintain, from urban Archdiocesan cemeteries to the rolling memorial gardens of American suburbs. These spaces, too, evolved as large corporations bought up cemeteries across the globe, expanding their portfolios, corporatizing operations, and earning fantastic profits. Most prominent among these has been Service Corporation International (SCI), which began acquiring funeral parlors in the 1960s and incorporated as a global corporation in 1984.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ SCI has since assiduously acquired funeral homes, cemeteries, florists and other related businesses in the United States and abroad, often geographically clustered together. “It’s the Wal-Mart of the cemetery business,” noted one union organizer.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

As a shadow owner of many thousands of funeral operations—and thanks to the rise in “pre-need” sales—SCI was able to bring in $1.5 billion in revenue in 1995.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ By 2019, SCI earned nearly a quarter of all funeral profits in the United States; that year, the company’s revenue exceeded $3 billion annually.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In southern California, SCI has amassed properties under the Dignity Memorial brand, which includes the 1,400 acre Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, billed as one of the largest cemeteries in the world. The corporation has also partnered with denominational cemeteries, such as those within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, to offer on-site mortuary services.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

While work at most of these SCI-run cemeteries has been divided out to myriad subcontractors, one local union in California has continued to fight for union recognition and contracts. In 2007, SEIU Local 265—which got its start in San Francisco and once sent its president, José Valdez, to help ACTWU’s campaign—won statewide jurisdiction over cemeteries, greens, and golf courses.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ John Martin, an organizer who came out of retirement after this victory, began driving up and down the state in a beat-up Honda Civic, distributing authorization cards and meeting with cemetery employees from Fresno to San Diego. In this work, Martin also dreamt of trying his hand at Los Angeles’ non-union cemeteries, especially those owned by the Archdiocese. In one major victory, Local 265 won an election at the Rose Hills in 2017, with 35 votes for the union and 23 against.Footnote ¹⁷¹ For the next four years, however, Rose Hills management engaged in all manner of anti-union activities to delay bargaining, and Local 265 filed a bevy of NLRB complaints.Footnote ¹⁷² For all intents and purposes, Rose Hills—like its Archdiocesan counterparts—remains union-free.

John Martin, who retired once again from organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic, laments this outcome, arguing that southern California’s cemeteries remain prime but difficult terrain for unionization.Footnote ¹⁷³ Their employees, deemed essential workers, “last responders,” and “quiet witness[es]” to the pandemic’s ravages, seek—like many before them—“to be treated with the same dignity and respect that we give to the families we serve.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴