Sheinkman’s Answer to Mahony

In a letter (Sept. 1) Archbishop Roger Mahony takes issue with an article by your reporters Bob Baker and John Dart (“Mahony’s Religious Suggestion to Jewish Unionist Stirs Anger,” Religion, Aug. 25). For the record, I think it’s important to state the matter as seen by our union.

Here are the facts: In 1988, more than 100 of the 130 gravediggers employed by the Los Angeles archdiocese signed union cards. Archbishop Mahony refused to recognize the union, demanding that we move to a well-established National Labor Relations Board procedure. To my amazement, he then came out against his own election plan, so we agreed to move to an impartial arbitration panel set up by the California Mediation Service to conduct the election.

Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union won the election. We were ruled valid later by an arbitration procedure set up with the full support of the archibishop. ACTWU and the archdiocese then met to negotiate a union contract--according to the recommendations of the impartial panel. The archbishop instructed his representatives to unilaterally walk out of the talks, declare our union null and void, and proceeded to hold his own union election with the only name on the ballot being a phony “company union.”

As for the correspondence between myself and the archbishop, again, he misstates the facts. Immediately after our union election, I called Archbishop Mahony on the phone--twice. He refused to take my calls, including one when I was in the office of the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Tom Donahue, when Donahue was attempting to mediate the situation.

When the archbishop began sending what I can only call harassing and cursory notes to me concerning the question of ACTWU’s position on abortion, I was duly insulted because of the archbishop’s tone. In his own words, he stated that he was “Praying that the spirit of Jesus Christ might take deep root in your own life. . . .” Now, first of all, in my mind, no religious teaching allows a religious leader to practice the crude tactics of a union-buster. And, secondly, I was certainly insulted by his lack of sensitivity concerning my own religious and ethnic background.

The fate of the gravediggers rests in the hands of the courts. Our interest still is--and will remain--to give legal representation to these workers. The archbishop’s continued cynical maneuvers only force us to remind ourselves of how far our nation must go to ensure the rights of workers. The very systems we saw collapse in Eastern Europe still are alive today in too many American workplaces, including in the archdiocese of Los Angeles, where workers’ rights are still denied.

JACK SHEINKMAN

President, ACTWU

New York