Cemetery Strike

The jovial gravediggers in Hamlet dug well while they cracked their elaborate jokes. However sad the friends of the sad Ophelia, they knew that she was at least safely, deeply buried. But if facetious gravediggers dig well, serious gravediggers may dig poorly, or indeed not at all. Such was the case in Manhattan last week when more than 300 serious gravediggers went on strike at Calvary, great Catholic cemetery. Due to the gravediggers' seriousness, hundreds of Catholic families feared lest their dead would be improperly, amateurishly buried.*

Why were the gravediggers grave? Because they received $5 per day, wanted $42 per week. Because they also wanted recognition of their newly-formed Cemetery Workers' Union and reinstatement of its president, one Henry Dougherty, cemetery chauffeur, who had been ousted just before the strike.

As the strike continued, an average of 30 bodies were received each day. After six days the unburied bodies totalled 249. Cemetery officials hastily collected strikebreakers. Many of them, kept ignorant of the nature of the work, quit when they found out. One man, who went to the cemetery with a steam shovel, left when he discovered he was strikebreaking. But 150 willing breakers dug 200 foot ditches to receive the caskets when the cemetery vaults (capacity 600) should be full.

To His Eminence Patrick Cardinal Hayes the strikers sent a telegram: TO MEET PUBLIC DEMAND TO END THE STRIKE WE PROPOSE THAT ALL QUESTIONS AND DISPUTES BE SETTLED BY A BOARD OF ARBITRATION. Officials refused to arbitrate, 18 superintendents of New York cemeteries having agreed that the strike was unjustified.

The cemetery was heavily picketed and guarded, but the strike was quiet. A sympathy strike of some 2,000 New York City cemetery workers loomed as a grim prospect. Fourteen local unions, dock workers, wreckers, barbers, window cleaners, pledged support to the cemetery men. Families who experienced or expected Death hoped for more active, if less grave gravediggers.

*They could, however, have no fear of unholy burial. So long as a body lies in a Catholic cemetery, be it buried in any fashion, it lies in consecrated ground.