Mahony Will Avoid Union Labor Day Breakfast

In another sign of his rift with unions, Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony has decided not to speak at the annual Labor Day breakfast of the Catholic Labor Institute, breaking with years of tradition.

Mahony told members of the institute’s board earlier this month that he will not speak at the Sept. 4 breakfast or preside at a Mass just before it, as he has done the last three years, said Patrick W. Henning, the institute’s executive director. For most of the 42 years the breakfast has been held, the Los Angeles archbishop has attended and celebrated a Labor Day Mass.

Bill Rivera, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said Mahony will hold his own Labor Day Mass the day before Labor Day at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. Henning said the institute has offered to co-sponsor the service.

A Year of Tension

For nearly a year, the relationship between Mahony and labor has been strained because of the archbishop’s active resistance to a campaign to organize the archdiocese’s cemetery workers.

The rift has been highly visible and vexing to labor leaders throughout the country because of Mahony’s past pro-labor record. He had actively supported the unionization of farm workers in the 1970s and was one of the first members of the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board. At the 1986 Labor Day breakfast, he urged union leaders to become actively involved in organizing the city’s low-wage domestic workers and in 1987 played a critical role in the campaign to have the state’s minimum wage raised from $3.35 to $4.25 an hour.

Although he opposes unionization of the cemetery workers, Mahony has consistently maintained that he is not anti-union. He has said that he would prefer to work “directly” with the workers, rather than through a union.

But some labor leaders have suggested that Mahony is concerned that if the 140 cemetery workers vote in a union, that could snowball among the archdiocese’s 9,000 other workers.

In February, the cemetery workers voted to be represented by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) by a margin of 66 to 62. But the archdiocese objected to the union’s tactics and a long hearing on the election campaign has just been concluded. A decision by a three-member arbitration panel on whether the vote will be upheld is expected in August.

Shaky Relationship

For now, the relationship between organized labor and the Los Angeles Archdiocese “is shaky at best,” William R. Robertson, executive secretary of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO), said this week. He criticized Mahony for “refusing to sit down and negotiate a meaningful contract” with the cemetery workers after they voted for a union.

“I don’t want to say all is lost,” Robertson said. “The labor movement would be delighted if we could resolve this issue and once again have a decent relationship with the archdiocese.”

As the dispute has dragged on, ACTWU has raised about $5,000 to send union organizer Cristina Vasquez and two cemetery workers to the Vatican this summer in hopes of gaining an audience with the Pope, according to Vasquez.

Rivera, the archdiocese spokesman, said Mahony’s decision to bypass the Labor Day breakfast has nothing to do with the cemetery workers’ dispute. Mahony, he explained, decided to have a separate Mass because it was likely to draw more people. Only “about 50 people” attended the Labor Day Mass in recent years, he said.

In addition, Rivera said, the archbishop believes “that the Labor Day breakfast has turned more into a (partisan) political gathering than a gathering honoring labor” and has felt “very uncomfortable being on the same platform and the same program with political people who are openly in favor of abortion,” including California’s Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston.

Abortion Not Discussed

But some labor leaders noted that while “pro-choice” politicians have spoken at the Labor Day breakfast, abortion has not been among their topics.

Moreover, they said Mahony had shared the dais in past years with Democratic politicians including Cranston, Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins, Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp and Mayor Tom Bradley but did not raise the issue of the breakfast being a partisan event until recently.

In fact, they said, shortly after last year’s breakfast, Mahony sent institute director Henning a letter calling the Mass and breakfast “significant celebrations.”

Then, five months later, Mahony sent Henning a scathing letter criticizing the institute and all of organized labor in Los Angeles. It was the day before the cemetery workers voted.

In the letter, Mahony indicated that neither he nor any auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles would attend Labor Day events sponsored “by the so-called ‘Catholic’ Labor Institute of Los Angeles.”

Mahony blasted the Labor Day Mass of September, 1988, as “a travesty” and called the institute a “hostile anti-Catholic union . . . so fully unacceptable that there is no redeeming value of any kind to be found.”

Union Denial

Union officials have repeatedly denied making anti-Catholic remarks during the cemetery campaign and said most of the cemetery workers are Catholic.

Although the breakfast has featured Democratic politicians in recent years, the long program also includes the presentation of honors to unions, companies with good labor-management relations and to individuals with long years of service to the labor movement.

Henning told Mahony in a letter in April that public officials are invited “based on their record of supporting and implementing the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church.” He said most of them are Democrats.

Last year, the institute, which takes no formal position on candidates for public office, turned down Republican Sen. Pete Wilson’s request to speak at the breakfast because he had recently crossed a picket line at a Sacramento hotel.