Gravediggers of Late Capitalism
Kornblum, William
BDRIED DEEP in the New York Times metropolitan section on November 6, 1998, was an article I had been awaiting far too long: "7-Month Labor Dispute Is Over at 8 Jewish Cemeteries in Area." I...
...We wound up after that with seven cemeteries in Northern New Jersey...
...But none of the strikes were as difficult and as personally stressful as the cemetery strikes...
...But in the end the Cemetery Employer Association of Greater New York, and the Jewish cemetery managements they represent, did concede to many of the union's demands...
...Even so, my dad seemed especially tormented...
...And soon enough contracts will expire and there will be more bargaining...
...Like many of his generation, my father went to his grave convinced that the worst of the antiunion days were over...
...They are all GIs...
...It was in the courts...
...I was fourteen and remember the mood of grief in our home as if it were yesterday...
...And then we got really lucky...
...He felt there was finally an acceptance of unions among the religious corporations, and especially at the powerful Catholic cemeteries...
...They shoveled the graves, used hand mowers and even scythes...
...In the seventh week of the strike all the men but the committee got a telegram from the diocese inviting them all to a meeting...
...Your eminence," he said, "What about our committee...
...Michael (Protestant...
...The leadership had already said they would seek to affiliate with another union if there was a wage offer they could live with...
...I am sure my father's anguish was the result of his failure to settle a strike that had taken on such deep personal meaning for all of us...
...The cardinal said if you go back to your seats I will go meet with the committee...
...When the grueling 1949 cemetery strike was finally settled, the men won a forty -hour week and a $6 - a-week raise...
...It was about how my father had berated the rabbis, something only another Jew could have done in that situation...
...The wives call and give it to me all the time...
...By 1967 we had fortyseven cemeteries but the membership had only grown to 1,700 because of automation, especially the earth-moving equipment...
...As Sam describes this period, the 1949 strike, that was the first real test...
...The men returned to their seats and the cardinal met with the committee...
...Today, with larger machines to dig graves there are about 350 full-time workers in all eight of the Jewish cemeteries where the strike recently ended...
...That's what the New York Archdiocese was called...
...One freezing gray day, as the strike and negotiations continued, uncles Lester and Izzie, burly iron workers, dug their mother's grave and lowered her pine coffin to the earth at Mt...
...You had about 350 workers in the average big cemetery, not including seasonal people...
...One must be of a certain age to remember the cemetery strikes after World War II...
...We were fifty guys, mostly returned vets and we first looked for a union...
...And in those days we had one full-time 56 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 union official...
...Others were equally convinced that all workers should earn a "decent wage...
...It was a move that added immeasurably to the opposition that greeted the largely Catholic cemetery workers in the coming years...
...The cardinal says, "No, they are communists...
...It was not political, it was because of the kind of work we did...
...THE ANSWER to that question hinges to a large degree on the future of unions and collective bargaining in the city and the nation...
...What will we do...
...He came running down the auditorium after them to try to get them to stay...
...The union was staunchly resisting new legislative requirements that it accept compulsory arbitration of labor disputes...
...With so many unskilled hands available in DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 57 GRAVEDIGGERS OF LATE CAPITALISM the city it must be tempting for the religious corporations to try to lower their labor costs...
...We were outside Mt...
...That acceptance of the rules and benefits of collective bargaining seemed to promise an end to the worst episodes of labor strife...
...My brother was in there...
...He was a labor lawyer, supposedly neutral in the many disputes that rocked the city's economy after the war, but at home he felt free to teach my brother and me about the value of labor unions to society...
...Carmel along the Interboro Parkway (now the Jackie Robinson) which winds through the necropolis of Brooklyn and Queens, Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected president...
...We are all better off—so they might learn from the gravediggers' example, if the people who care for our needs have strong, democratic unions with dedicated and modestly heroic leaders like Sam Cimaglie...
...Judah, and Mt...
...Tears were flooding Sam's eyes as he told me this story...
...Strikes, in his view, were most often a symptom of badfaith negotiations, usually the result of employer greed or union political intransigence or corruption...
...They would give us everything we had elsewhere but the union shop . . . . They had scabs doing the work...
...They argued with somewhat arrogant naivete that $700 a week was an excessive wage for relatively unskilled workers...
...But he had heard many stories about families burying their loved ones during cemetery strikes...
...And so we quickly moved on to the broader subject of my visit: Why, I wondered, have the city's vast and seemingly peaceful cemeteries been such a contested terrain of labor strife over the years...
...They disrupted family life at its most vulnerable moments of crisis...
...Even their electricity...
...Soon they would be back to work...
...Perhaps the cemetery corporations have re-learned the lessons that Sam Cimiglie and his adversaries learned earlier in the century about the benefits of collective bargaining and sustained labor peace...
...I had been watching one group of sullen gravediggers outside Mt...
...The work was all done by hand...
...Then inside me I heard a voice which was not my voice...
...I knew the gravediggers' union had a stormy history, but I was unaware that its difficulties had lasted for so long...
...I went to jail for a while...
...He was shouting that our per-capita tax was going to the Communist Party...
...I REVIEWED very quickly what my project was about, but it wasn't necessary...
...Five union members were arrested in scuffles outside the cemetery gates...
...But the CIO put us in the Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union...
...We had no NLRB rights, but we won the election and were trying to get them to give us a contract...
...So the AFL offered us a charter with the old Building Service Employees International Union, with our own charter...
...Hebron (Jewish...
...Jewish law demands that DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 53 GRAVEDIGGERS OF LATE CAPITALISM the dead be buried within twenty four hours after death...
...Jack Ryan, president of Local 74 of the SEIU, which represents the cemetery workers as part of a larger amalgamated union local, was pleased to announce that at Mt...
...David Sullivan, BSEIU Vice President, got Hugh Sheridan as impartial chairman...
...I think it was during the sixth week of the long 1953 cemetery workers strike when my grandmother, my mother's mother, died at the age of eighty-three...
...Each time I stopped, Sammy Acevedo, their shop steward, had a hopeful word or two with me in front of the men: yes, negotiations were progressing...
...Don't show us that kind of love no more,' my brother said...
...The union started in 1937 at Greenwood in Brooklyn, one of the city's oldest and most beautiful cemeteries, the permanent home of luminaries like DeWitt Clinton, Samuel Morse, the Tiffanys, Henry George, Boss Tweed, Margaret Sanger, Henry Ward Beecher, George Tilyou (one of my favorites, creator of the Steeplechase amusement park at Coney Island), and many, many others...
...From time to time I stopped my car and got out to chat with them for a few minutes before my class at nearby Queens College...
...Out of Christian charity I think you should give them a week's pay when they return to work.' And Cardinal Spellman did that...
...By mid-century the courts and the state intervened to form more publicly accountable trusts and a state cemetery board that controls the nonsectarian cemeteries...
...The economic security of many of their recent-immigrant parents, and, less directly, even the future of the public university they attend, depend on the success of workers' efforts to gain union recognition and bargain collectively...
...Sam greeted me warmly as I entered...
...Then we started to organize new areas and to spread out...
...We were in the seventh week of the strike and the labor movement in the city was shunning us...
...They were some of the most hard fought and bitter in this "labor town," even if the dock strikes and the newspaper strikes stand out more clearly in historical memory...
...As I WATCHED the lack of progress after seven months of lockout and picketing at Mt...
...You know these strikes were always terrible...
...Our guys were getting completely cut off...
...and St...
...In the late 1940s and through much of the 1950s, Daniel Kornblum, my father, was the labor mediator for New York City...
...He'd been a founding member of Local 807 of the Teamsters and then became a trucking owner, Duncan Sheridan Trucking Lines...
...Hebron Cemetery...
...It's winter, hardly anyone is around...
...The other lawyer who helped us when John Harold was away, he said "Don't stay away, but pick somebody to be a spokesman and at the meeting ask the cardinal to meet with the committee...
...WILLIAM KORNBLUM is a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and coauthor with Terry Williams of Uptown Kids (Putnam...
...The men were angry about this and wanted to stay away...
...Sam explained that he told the cardinal he was being hypocritical...
...These disputes involved the city's religious leaders...
...From cradle to grave, I tried to show my students, a "service economy" requires unions as much as one dominated by manufacturing does...
...That same year there were many other violent strikes in the region's cemeteries...
...C'mon Sam, give us $10,000 for a contract...
...The old man is wringing his hands and saying "What will we do...
...Sam knew I had a story to tell him...
...We were just getting buried deeper and deeper...
...Lutheran and Evergreen (nonsectarian...
...After agreeing to further negotiations the cardinal led the committee into the meeting...
...An arrangement was made for them to enter the cemetery by a side entrance...
...The Teamsters also approached us...
...I mean the cardinal, Spellman himself...
...There were two small strikes in process, and a mailing of a new contract for the workers to ratify in all the other cemeteries...
...When President Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers, we the living witnessed the dissolution of the post-World War II labor-management compact our parents had fought for...
...The next day I went to the Cathedral and for fourteen days I was on a hunger strike...
...But over seven months of lockout there had been violence reminiscent of the bad old days...
...Hebron's gates the men stamped their feet against the cold and breathed jets of coffee steam across their paper cups...
...He gave us a word-for-word account of his efforts to have them accept the settlement that the powerful Catholic cemetery corporation had already agreed to...
...First thing to understand, Bill, is that the cemeteries are run by religious corporations...
...But then I made a complete reversal on the arbitration issue...
...During the meeting he kept saying he loved us all...
...The head of the International Cemetery Workers Union was out in front of the court every day picketing and raising money for the defense...
...I was on the union committee then...
...They are killing us...
...All over the region Jewish families were distraught because they could not hold unveilings of gravestones for their loved ones...
...He watched the 1998 lockout from the sidelines, but his leadership is still vivid in the memories of union veterans...
...Thanks to their union and to their own solidarity, the gravediggers are still making a living wage...
...The extreme heat or cold, people go then, it affects their respiration...
...They are outside...
...You can only be one person," he laughed as we sat down...
...He said we should get a forty-hour week and a $6-aweek raise in pay...
...George sees it and says, 'Tom, this is a disgrace...
...It was terrible...
...AT MID-CENTURY there were nine cemeteries organized in the union: Greenwood and Holy Cross St...
...We are going to see Cardinal Juido, the emissary to the pope here in Washington.' Sure enough the cardinal wires the pope with the whole story and the pope pulls Boland and appoints Monseigneur Gerrity as New Jersey archbishop in his place...
...Then Tom Donahue, the assistant to George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO calls: "Sam, I witnessed a miracle today...
...In the meantime the gravediggers and their families were starving...
...Imagine how that looked for us in the papers...
...As my interview that day almost ten years ago came to an end, Cimaglie was in an upbeat mood about the future of his union...
...Collective bargaining was the way out of class exploitation...
...It is a little-known chapter in the region's labor history, for it matters not at all to the GNP whether gravediggers make a living wage or not...
...Two of the locked-out union men were injured severely...
...They set it down at the gates...
...Sam Cimaglie was still president at the time, but his health was declining and he was looking forward to retirement...
...When we met that day, Sam's wife, Tina, was helping out at the local...
...I realized God was telling me to go on a hunger strike...
...They were locked out and miserable...
...I was taken to the hospital and placed in an intensive care unit...
...We could not go...
...Ridgewood's thriving commercial district reminds one of the downtown in any major Midwestern industrial city...
...My father was not at home much in the days after her death...
...Hugh Sheridan, what a human being...
...Ten dissidents who crossed over and scabbed were kept in the union...
...There were about 350 GRAVEDIGGERS OF LATE CAPITALISM working at Calvary then and we averaged sixty burials a day...
...They are fired...
...58 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...
...In my home the gravediggers were part of the family saga...
...Hugh Sheridan and Dave Sullivan .. . set up a meeting again with the cardinal...
...But Hugh just went on telling the cardinal what he thought...
...As soon as the meeting started, Hugh Sheridan said, 'Your Eminence, you need to get rid of those cemetery trustees...
...John, Calvary (the Catholic cemeteries), Union Field, Mt...
...I see this in front of my eyes now, whenever I think about this...
...The old-pattern bargaining system in which the Catholic cemeteries led the negotiations seems to have crumbled...
...But when I told John the family side, which he did not know, his eyes moistened again and he made me promise that I would someday tell Sam Cimaglie this part of the tale...
...We were the first cemetery workers' union in the U.S...
...Sam Cimaglie's local had 1,200 members in these, all of them in the city...
...The Newark strike in 1973, when we were trying to get a first contract for Holy Cross Cemetery of the New Jersey Archdiocese was maybe the worst of them all...
...I can't help crying...
...Archbishop Boland out there had hired a union-busting firm (Lewis and Jackson...
...You've got to remember, Bill, that we were fighting "The Powerhouse...
...You will not fail, Sam," says the Voice...
...A minority of my students at the college was far less convinced...
...But when he saw the men get up he lost his composure...
...Not the committee...
...In those days all the cemetery contracts exDISSENT / Spring 1999 n 55 GRAVEDIGGERS OF LATE CAPITALISM pired at different times...
...The constant scenes of family anguish became too much for him and other union leaders: One day, Bill, as the Good Lord is my judge, I saw something that made me think it all over again...
...The two of us can carry her inside...
...And the little boy puts his arm around him and says, "Don't cry grandpa...
...Through the forties the cemeteries expanded and so did the union, which in 1949 signed its first national charter, with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO...
...But Lord look at me," I GRAVEDIGGERS OF LATE CAPITALISM said, "I can hardly wait to get home to eat now...
...A tall man with plenty of gray hair and a trim physique, but slightly wary in his motions, betraying his recent illness, he extended his hand and a broad smile...
...I went in to see George with his mail and a copy of the Washington Post...
...Summer had ended...
...Well of course I waved to the men and we carried her in so fast . . . but when you see that kind of thing over and over and it makes you think there's got to be other ways of settling these things...
...Archbishop Boland was out to break us and I thought I was dying...
...STRIKE TALKS faltered and to make matters worse the cardinal sent seminarians out to bury bodies in the Catholic cemeteries...
...They had won a raise of $23 a week, bringing their weekly wages that much over $700...
...But in today's labor-management environment, with weakened public support for unions and emboldened bosses, one wonders if labor peace will ever finally settle on the graveyards...
...There are no signs of gentrification, but plenty of signs, in the people on the streets and in the shops, of the old and new immigrations...
...Everybody has my home number...
...knew how both sides operate and think...
...At that time, Sam remembers, "we were barely hanging on...
...Some men in the union came to me...
...We had five thousand bodies piled up...
...Unlike Cimaglie and the burial workers, my father was spared the war on unions and on the labor laws he had helped to create...
...His Cemetery Workers Local 365 of the Service Employees International Union had recently been 54 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 merged into the larger SEIU Local 74...
...The locked-out cemetery workers at the gates of a Jewish cemetery near Queens College were a reminder to me of the continuing and vital importance of labor unions in the lives of working people...
...At that, all the guys get up to leave...
...The others are nonreligious not-forprofit corporations...
...The CIO sent Louis Haywood to meet with us, to have us go in with the Steelworkers...
...As John told it, with his Irish love of a good yarn, the story was one of those wonderful episodes of New York ethnic labor politics...
...We were supposed to be a communist dominated union...
...The paper had a photo of you praying and fasting...
...A number of years ago, before the most recent episode of labor strife over the graveyards, I did go to visit the cemetery workers' union founding president...
...At the meeting we voted to disaffiliate...
...Do what Gandhi did," it says...
...So they would leave the body at the gate of the cemetery, and of course none of us would bring them in...
...He had a story for me, he said, one that he and Sam Cimaglie, the union's founder and then-president, told about the terrible 1953 strike...
...This was a communist union, but they didn't put us there because of that...
...What do I do...
...This went on for weeks while inside the cemetery foremen buried the dead and scab "replacement workers" clipped the grass around the graves...
...When he met me and learned that Daniel was my father, tears came to his eyes...
...There was no control of them...
...Hebron again, picketing...
...These are Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish corporations that are nonprofit...
...He...
...And to make it worse at the same time the trial of the ten communists in Judge Medina's court was going on...
...He railed against the stubbornness of the rabbis who were holding out in the negotiations...
...One of the so-called temporary replacement workers was stabbed, although not critically...
...Union members were actually asking Sam to consider murder...
...The Newark strike "was turning good, hard-working people into animals...
...By 1953 Sam went on the union payroll as a full timer...
...If the cemetery corporations could find labor "in the free market" at a lower rate they should be allowed to do so...
...At Mt...
...It was the essential change that would civilize capitalism...
...Hebron this past year, I wondered what had happened...
...According to the law they don't even have to recognize unions...
...John had been the lawyer for the cemetery workers since the late 1940s...
...Sam," they say, "We've got to kill these two scab leaders in the cemetery...
...And I was reminded again of how many union struggles go largely unnoticed and yet how momentous the moral issues can become for the people involved...
...both sides and the mediators were, as the newspapers like to say, "locked in negotiations...
...I always pray to keep the men together...
...They hired scabs and stuck to a hard line in the bargaining that kept the union workers locked outside their gates for seven long months...
...I had a history of heart trouble and it didn't take me too long without eating to think my heart was going...
...The union committee had none to show and were kept out...
...The religious cemeteries, which form the majority, are still run by the religious corporations...
...Fights between union men and scabs brought injuries to both sides...
...The cardinal was wearing his long robes...
...The next day Bishop Gerrity pulls up to the cemetery in a little Volkswagen and says, "Tell the men to go back to work...
...Hebron cemetery on the Brooklyn and Queens border...
...They are old fogies.' Everyone was shocked...
...No one cared about the picketing...
...Of course in the papers the employers say that "both sides came away with things they needed...
...Hebron and elsewhere they will hardly make up what they lost during the strike over the length of the contract...
...Each time the union attempted to organize in a new cemetery or a different part of the metropolitan region, it faced bitter resistance and prolonged strikes...
...All the men came and showed their telegrams at the door...
...But earlier in the century it mattered a great deal to union people throughout the region that their dead were being buried by union workers earning a union wage...
...Collective bargaining agreements were necessary, if not sufficient, they reasoned, to ensure that this would be possible...
...The story of the cemetery workers union is filled with larger meanings, political, cultural, and personal...
...Hebron the 120 gravediggers and groundskeepers would be called back immediately...
...Before the 1940s, Sam explained, "they were all robbing the families blind, it was terrible, a shame...
...As God is my judge, when I was driving home that evening I called out, "God, what do I do...
...The ethnic, racial backgrounds of my students at Queens College are strikingly similar to those of the cemetery workers who stood in the cold not far from the college gates...
...But was it worth it...
...Frank McClosky got up to speak...
...When my father took his place as a "permanent New Yorker" in the family plot at Mt...
...We would go around to other unions and not raise a dime in support...
...The meeting was held at Cathedral High School, in the auditorium...
...Too many students, however, voiced no opinion at all on the issues and seemed never to have given them much thought...
...But we knew it was just for show," Sam laughed, "They couldn't really do it...
...Sam explained, "because we wouldn't go to arbitration under the Emergency Burial Act...
...But neither of them would offer us a charter...
...When he returned from World War II, Sam went to work at Calvary Cemetery...
...If he says no, then you walk...
...At one moment in my adolescence they involved our own extended family quite directly...
...All our union business was carried on after work hours or on released time...
...He listened to my brief tale and was touched by its ironies...
...Labor-management conflict was encapsulated, to use Daniel Bell's apt term, in a structure of laws and procedures like arbitration and collective bargaining that would never guarantee complete labor peace, but would at least bring routine class conflict under the rule of law...
...But at Mt...
...Frank says, "They're not communists...
...We also held our first general membership meeting, not just of the striking cemeteries...
...They are taking the bread from our children's mouths...
...But as Sam explained, for quite a while the union remained small and weak with "just a handful of men before the war...
...The teamsters who drive the hearses were honoring the picket lines...
...But for our interview Sam met me at the union's old headquarters in Ridgewood, Queens...
...Well this hearse pulls up with a plain pine coffin, a small one...
...We've got to bury grandma...
...Many years later, shortly after my father's death, I joined the Board of Herman Benson's Association for Union Democracy, where I was introduced to attorney John Harold, a veteran of the same period of labor struggles...
...And for me this labor strife in the city's Jewish necropolis brought back a flood of memories...
...Then I see a little old man and a small boy, a kid, eight or nine years old...
...I'll bring disgrace on you and all of us if we fail...
...They had not crossed the picket lines...
...But other union workers, especially those in the monument trades, refused to cross the picket lines...
...You have a union shop...
...It could easily go as high as 120 in the summer or the winter...
...We wanted to be our own local, which they were not offering...
...Throughout the fifties there were milk strikes, newspaper strikes, tug and longshore strikes, strikes on construction sites, and all of them he took personally as failures of negotiation, his own failures to convince the parties of the need to bargain in good faith...
...The eight Jewish cemeteries attempted to get an agreement more favorable to their needs...
...Then he said, 'Your Eminence, these men have been out for many weeks now...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
