Kim Kelly's Morbid Labor Tales

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Kim Kelly and I'll be your host for today's episode. I'm a labor journalist and the author of a book called Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor. One of my self-styled superpowers is finding a way to link labor history with present day goings on. I'm not an official historian, but I've read a lot of books and talked to a lot of workers, and that's how you find all the good stuff anyway. I like to say that every story is a labor story, and that ethos can be applied to basically any scenario, especially if you dig down deep enough. Autumn has finally come to the East Coast. I'm talking leather weather, dead leaves, cool temperatures,

and a blessed end to the infernal sunshine that has plagued my days for so long. Those of us in my neck of the woods are preparing for mischief night, and Halloween itself is only a few nights away. It's a good time to tell stories around a campfire or in a darkened room. Though if your spirit cabinet is still in the shop, your headphones will work just fine.

Now since I've already got you in my clutches, let's get into a little morbid labor history. And admittedly, there's a real dearth of genuinely spooky labor actions out there in the modern day or otherwise. I mean, we haven't seen any vampiric work stoppages or witches strikes, though I wouldn't put it past the Etsy coven to eventually get organized.

And the only real monster we can point to as workers is capitalism and its bloodthirsty minions in the employer class. There's a historical fantasy novel called The Factory Witches of Lowell that looks pretty cute and does involve a witch's union, but I'd rather take this in a more concrete direction, shall we say. Let's talk about gravedigger strikes. So, quick note on language. Gravedigger is clearly way more fun to say, but the proper term is cemetery worker. The classic horror movie trope of the disheveled, shady, creepy gravedigger with his shovel and medicine cackle doesn't quite apply these days. And I'm sure today's cemetery workers don't really appreciate that stereotype.

There are no midnight resurrections or bloody shovels lying around anymore. This is municipal work, really. Nowadays, cemetery workers operate heavy machinery to perform burials, to maintain cemetery grounds and dig foundations for headstones and monuments. These are skilled workers whose world straddles maintenance, construction, and landscaping, and a lot of them are union city workers. They're first on the scene to ready the grave and the last to say goodbye once everyone else leaves. It is tempting to romanticize the gig, especially if you're a morbid little freak like me, but Even with the aid of modern advancements, digging graves remains hard, dirty, intensive physical labor that can wear down the body and

take a mental and emotional toll on the worker. There's still a lot of dead bodies involved, after all. Given the nature of their work, cemetery workers are no strangers to cooperation on the job. Nor are they afraid of collective action. There's a long history of gravediggers going on strike. though it's truly a wonder that any boss has ever dared to push them to that point, given the kind of leverage these particular workers wield. Strikes are meant to be disruptive, and there are few things more guaranteed to disrupt a city's normal operating procedure than a rotting pile of unburied corpses. That's what happened in 1949 in New York City, when tensions rose between the trustees of St.

Patrick's Cathedral in Queens and 250 of its cemetery workers. These workers were predominantly Irish and Italian Catholics who earned about $ 60 a week, around $ 700 in today's dollars, for a six-day, 40-hour work week. After a breakdown in contract negotiations between the bosses and the unions, in which the workers were pushing for a five-day, 40-hour work week, higher wages, and overtime, the union called a strike for January 13th.

I don't think it was a Friday, but it would be very satisfying if it was. So the work stoppage lasted for just under two months, and in that time, a thousand bodies went unburied. Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of the city's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, summoned 200 untrained college students from St. Joe's Seminary to fill in the scabs. One can only imagine how well these kids, who were far more used to flipping Bible pages than engaging in any kind of real heavy toil, adapted to chipping grays out of the cold winter dirt, But it's not exactly the kind of assignment you can turn down if you're trying to be like an extra special kind of priest, you know?

I was raised Catholic. I feel like I can be as rude about these dudes as I want. Sorry, Grandma. The strike caused a stir among the city's Catholic labor activists, particularly the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, the Catholic Worker newspaper, and its founder, the renowned Catholic anarchist labor activist Dorothy Day, still waiting for her to be sainted. It's coming. I can feel it. she personally took up the cause, both at the cemetery and outside the Cardinal's residence on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, and delivered food and medicine to the Stryker's families.

Dorothy Day wrote directly to the Cardinal, emphasizing the economic hardships the workers faced and asking him to go to them, conciliate them. It is easier for the great to give in than the poor. They are hungry men. Their only weapon has been their labor. which they have sold for a means of livelihood to feed themselves and their families.

The 70s being what they were, what had begun as a pretty straightforward dispute over time and money morphed into a really ugly, weird squabble over communism. Conservative Catholic leaders red-baited the union members because union, and the cardinal decried their tactics as communistic. And now the workers got really pissed off about this because they hated communism too. And they took an anti-red oath to denounce communism in the middle of their strike. And they also, at the archdiocese's insistence, disaffiliated from their union and joined the more conservative AFL as members of the Building Services Employees International Union. So they got red-baited out of their union, and they still didn't even really win the strike. They eventually went back

to work on March 12th and picked up their shovels in defeat. but it would be far from the last time America's gravediggers would call the bosses bluff. In 1975, 1,700 members of the local 365 of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendance Union followed the lead of their predecessors and struck for higher wages at 44 cemeteries in the New York metropolitan area. By the end of that 27-day strike, the workers had won a small wage increase, and 1,400 bodies were waiting to be buried. Absent from those piles were the dead of the Orthodox Jewish community, whose faith requires burial within 24 hours. In recognition, the Union had invited the loved ones of deceased Orthodox Jews to enter the cemetery and bury those bodies in accordance with their religion.

Picket lines are sacred, but so are a lot of other things too. The next year, gravediggers from Cemetery Workers Local 265 on the West Coast launched a four-month strike that shut down 10 California cemeteries, including in Colma, a small town near San Francisco that had, quote, The combination of manual labor, low pay, and cemetery-specific occupational hazards continued to spur cemetery workers to strike throughout the 80s and 90s.

A few years earlier, a massive wave of strikes had overtaken the UK during 1978 and 1979's Winter of Discontent, and a group of cemetery workers in Liverpool had found themselves embroiled in a conflict that would become the subject of feverish national attention. Those 80 workers were the members of GMB, a general trade union, who had decided to join the thousands of other public sector employees who were already on strike around the country at the time. Unfortunately, those other workers' absence was a little less... visible. And the backlash to the cemetery strike was brutal. The workers were demonized in the press and condemned by art school Margaret Thatcher herself. Photos of unburied bodies ran on the

front pages over headlines screaming things like, now they won't let us bury our dead. Members of parliament called the strike an outrage to human decency. It was a lot. So the workers decided to end the strike after a week and a half. They were worried that their actions were hurting everyday people instead of the government that was causing so much suffering. Conservative politicians seized on the strike's shocking imagery to batter the Labour Party. They swept into power in the next election, all of which allowed Margaret Thatcher to eventually launch her own war on the working class.

In 2021, with Thatcher safely rotting in her own grave, Liverpool's cemetery workers threatened to walk out again, but this time they managed to strike a deal at the 11th hour. I have a feeling no one wanted to repeat that whole situation. As each of these strike actions and many more besides have shown, cemetery workers and the work they do are absolutely essential. Without them, neither the living nor the dead can find peace. And the vital importance of that work should leave no argument over whether they should be paid fairly and treated well. Greedy bosses who have refused to reckon that have done so at their peril. Remember, gravediggers know where all the bodies are buried. Who do you think put them there in the first place? Speaking

of unburied corpses, cemetery workers weren't the only unionized workforce that has had to navigate a truly cursed minefield of bad bosses, public horror, and decaying human remains during a labor dispute. Here in Philadelphia, we got a front-row seat to that particular balancing act last summer during the huge Astme DC-33 municipal worker strike that effectively shut down a good chunk of the city for eight very sweaty days in July. The most visible of the workers who went out came from the sanitation department. A heat wave was pummeling the city when they walked out on July 1st.

And if you think Philly's a little grimy on a normal day, you should have seen and smelled the reeking mountains of trash that accumulated in what seemed like mere hours. Being the deep-thin serious city that we are, we obviously dubbed them Parker Piles after our evil mayor. The sanitation workers weren't the only municipal workers who went out, though.

The strike also included clerical employees, library staff, street pavers, water department workers, and the medical examiner's office. That last one made a real big splash real quick. Because you know what the medical examiner is in charge of? The city morgue. Now, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the 160-bed facility was filled to overflowing within the first 48 hours of the strike. Look. Philly's the best city in the world, but we do have our problems, and among those problems are, you know, sometimes people get murked. The city morgue is a pretty busy place. Now, during the strike, during those first awful 48 hours, the remaining staffers were left scrambling to find room for 180 bodies, and they ultimately had

to double up on space, squeezing two cadavers into each bed. While the workers who usually handle death investigations and body transportation were on the picket line, Grieving families were left in the lurch. In one especially horrific moment, the body of a 19-year-old gunshot victim was left bleeding in the street for hours before someone came to pick him up.

By day three of the strike, the city had had enough. They forced the medical examiner's office back to work via court injunction, citing a threat to public health and safety. You'd think the mayor and her cronies at City Hall would have maybe taken a minute to look into what had happened in other recent morgue-related strikes. or even into what happened back in 1986 when the Philadelphia city workers had launched another massive strike that included medical examiner staff.

If they had, they might have realized just what a terrifically bad idea it can be to piss off the people who take care of all the dead bodies. Chicago folks might know where I'm going with this. Let's talk about the Cook County morgue scandal. In 2011, a string of institutional failures at the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner Illinois had led to a truly unbearable work environment for both the workers and the human remains they were charged with handling. Among other factors, funding cuts and changes in policy for handling infant remains and the unclaimed bodies of the dead had led to a staggering pileup of cadavers. At the time, CBS News reported that 400 adults and 100 babies were being kept in a cooler

meant for 300 bodies total. A whistleblower leaked photos of the carnage to the media, who predictably blew it up into a massive public scandal. Which seems pretty fair, honestly, when you read some of the workers' quotes on the subject. As one said, There are so many bodies in there now, they can't keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing I've ever seen. I think it's sacrilegious. Photos showed bodies wrapped in plastic, haphazardly stacked on wooden shelves, while others were left rotting on the floor. Like, it was...

It was fucked. It was really, really bad. And a worker told the public about it and some stuff changed. Shout out to the whistleblowers. Health hazards aside, it's just really fucking grim to hear these stories and to think about someone's grandma or granddaughter or mom left in that condition because someone in an office somewhere decided that those greedy corpse handlers could get by on a smaller budget.

The state labor department dinged them with 21 safety and sanitation violations after this all came out, including exposure to hepatitis B, blood splatter, and a failure to protect workers from the risk of being hit by falling bodies. The resulting reforms, purges, and mass burials that followed the whole affair make it sound even more like something out of an indie horror movie, but that's bureaucracy, baby. We've jumped from the graveyard to the morgue. and now it's time to make a stop at the funeral home. To bounce back to New York City, I want to shout out one of its other particularly ghoulish post-mortem labor conflicts. For whatever reason, there have been a lot of corpse-related worker

actions out there. Like, more than really seems reasonable, but with so many of the living being pushed out of New York every day, I guess it makes sense that even the dead can't always find a decent place to rest. So back in 1964, on October 1st, Over 400 embalmers, undertakers, and funeral directors from across the five boroughs went on strike.

Classic strike action, they're calling for higher wages, better pensions, and a 35-hour work week, which does sound like a pretty big ask for the 60s if you don't think much about what their work days actually looked like. And forget that they're only making $ 122 a week. When talks broke down between members of Local 407, of the Funeral Directors and Balmers and Undertakers Union, who are part of the SCIU Extended Universe, also, if anyone can find a t-shirt, I will give you not a lot of dollars because I don't have a lot, but I would, let me know.

I will haunt eBay for the rest of my days if I can find a Local 407 shirt. But when talks broke down between the union and the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, workers at 100 of the busiest, most high-profile funeral homes in the city walked out, which left their supervisors, funeral home executives, and owners to handle the avalanche of bodies that were quickly left in their wake. It's funny, after only eight days of getting their hands dirty, the bosses were absolutely exhausted and dying for their workers to come back. So they backed down. The embalmers came back to work with an immediate wage increase and a bunch of other goodies too. As we've learned, as far as leverage goes, it's hard to argue with a rotting corpse.

One last little tidbit I'd like to share before we go our separate ways comes courtesy of the Columbarium, an extremely fun newsletter about death from writer and death educator Becky Robeson. I saw her post about this story a little bit ago, and I had to hit her up for more details. Labor ghouls of a feather flock together, I guess. So, 1852. 200 of New York's coffin makers went on strike. Now, it may have been the Gilded Age, but it still stunk pretty bad back then, especially in the summertime when diseases like cholera, smallpox, and typhoid ran rampant.

The poor bastards working at the city morgue would have killed for the kind of refrigeration setup they had in Cook County. But at the time, the best they could do was to keep their stiffs on ice. Literally. Literally. They would have used ice-lined wooden boxes called corpse coolers to keep the deceased and their loved ones by proxy as comfortable as possible before the funeral. We can really only do so much. The coffin workers were well aware of this fact and used their leverage, there's that word again, to ensure that when they joined the strike, their impact would be felt immediately. But this wasn't just a coffin maker's strike. They were part of a much bigger labor action that pulled together thousands upon thousands of workers from

across 30 different industries from all over the city to call for an eight-hour workday. That movement had been bubbling for years at that point, with smaller local winds in New England inspiring workers in other regions to take up the rally and cry. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. That 1872 strike drew over 100,000 workers in total. and scared the bejesus out of the corporate titans and city elites, who were suddenly faced with the harsh reality that, gosh, there really were a whole lot more workers than there were of them. They responded accordingly, weaponizing the police department. Piano man William Steinway personally hired 300 cops to protect his factory.

Very fancy. Forcing lockouts and basically doing whatever they could to knock the fight out of the strikers. The workers won eventually, and that strike would prove to be just one more bloody stepping stone towards that eventual victory. The coffin makers had the last laugh, though. By the time that strike ended, 125 of the 200 strikers had forced concessions out of their bosses, which, given the way Victorian bosses tended to react to workers' labor demands, is pretty incredible.

The unique nature of their employment as death workers saved them once again. As the Chicago Tribune wrote of the coffin makers and their strike at the time, quote, we see no escape from his clutches. We can resist the bricklayer by not building houses. We can offset the calciminer by refusing to whiten our walls. We can checkmate the servant by doing our own work. But unfortunately, as far as our pockets are concerned, we have got to die and we have got to be buried. And if the coffin maker persists in his demands, We know of no way in which we can refuse to patronize him. I'll leave you with one final quote from that same article that I just love. Not because of his intention, which was essentially whining about the coffin makers daring to demand

to be paid fairly for their essential work, but because the Tribune accidentally makes a great observation about how fucked up it is that we're forced to spend every moment of our lives worrying about paying bills. You're right, 19th century newspaper hack. Unions are cool. and the necessities of life and death should be free for everyone. Quote, It is not enough that man, worm of the dust, must be perplexed and worried in life, must be reminded at every turn that this is a veil of tears and that all is vanity, but even after he is dead and no longer exposed to tailor's bills and house rents and butcher's bills and pew rents and servant-galism and the thousand natural shocks that flesh his air to, there is

still a class of men left who can worry his goat. So that was my spooky labor Halloween episode for you. I hope you liked it. Thank you for listening. Now go give your boss a scare for me. Have a happy Halloween. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Kim Kelly's Morbid Labor Tales

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