Mahony Gains Clout With His Union Support.

BARBARA Mejia could hardly believe what she was hearing at the recent AFL-CIO national convention in Los Angeles.

In 1988, Mejia led the effort to organize 150 cemetery workers at the Los Angeles Archdiocese with the Amalgamated. Clothing and Textile Workers Union. After three elections and an acrimonious conflict with Cardinal Roger Mahony, the gravediggers voted against unionization.

Now Mahony was standing before her and giving the invocation at the nation's biggest annual union gathering.

"I'm watching him and I'm thinking, wow, all of that was 11 years ago," said Mejia, now a negotiator with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile. Employees in San Diego. "He's opened up his eyes to the fact the labor movement is moving along. He is recognizing that it is a political power in L.A."

If that's true, there are few people who could have as powerful an impact on behalf of organized labor. As the leader of an estimated 4 million Catholics in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Mahony and the unions have overlapping constituencies - recently immigrated Latinos.

"Cardinal Mahony is the strongest individual leader in Los Angeles because he represents an organization where he is CEO, president, and COO all in one," said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of L.A. "What he says, goes. There is no organization left in L.A., no company, no political entity, no non-profit, no university who works like that anymore."

Mahony also represents a powerful symbolic force. As a member of the College of Cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, he is considered one of the "princes" of the organization, directly under the authority of the Pope.

"For deeply religious people, it's like having God on your side," said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, executive director of L.A. Alliance for a New Economy, which organized the movement for L.A.'s living wage ordinance.

The cardinal himself doesn't see any difference between what he's doing now on behalf of unions and what he was doing five years ago. It just happens that the church and unions often have unified interests.

"We have many goals that are similar and some that are different," Mahony said in an interview last week. "Most of them have to do with enhancing the dignity and the quality of life in our family and the community. Obviously, we are not in the profession of organizing employees, but we want to make sure that employees have a family wage, benefits and there is dignity added to their work."

Mahony generally has had a close relationship with unions, dating back to the 1970s when he supported Cesar Chavez's efforts to organize Latino farm workers in Central California. That relationship turned rocky during the cemetery workers' dispute at the end of the last decade.

Ever since, Mahony has been working quietly behind the scenes to support union efforts. But as the decade comes to a close, there are signs that he is ready to take a much more public role once again.

Besides appearing at the AFL-CIO convention, Mahony recently called for mediation of a labor struggle that has been going on for years between hospital operator Catholic Healthcare West and the Service Employees International Union.

About 1,500 workers at three hospitals owned by Catholic Healthcare West have been seeking to unionize. They accuse the hospital operator's management of thwarting their efforts to do so by using intimidation tactics. The three hospitals involved are the St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and the St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles.

San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, one of the largest hospital chains in the state, is overseen by several orders of nuns. Day-to-day operations, however, are in the hands of a non-church-related management team.

Mahony' s request for mediation was lauded by area clergy, including the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice and Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice.

"I call it a significant step for him," said the Rev. William Monroe Campbell, outreach coordinator for CLUE. "I don't doubt that he struggled with it because of his experience with the cemetery workers. The position that he took is reflective of the biblical posture and consistent with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. He realizes it's important for CHW and SEIU to sit and have meaningful discussions with each other."

Mahony' s power to influence the opinions of Latino Catholic workers was never more convincingly demonstrated than it was a decade ago - when, ironically, he was doing everything he could to prevent them from joining a union.

Soon after Mahony was appointed archbishop of Los Angeles in 1985, the controversy with the archdiocese's gravediggers began. Between 1988 and 1991, the cemetery workers - a majority of them Catholic and Latino - went through three elections.

The first one had a very small majority in favor of unionization. Mahony refused to negotiate for a contract, saying the ratification came about as a result of unfair union conduct. The second vote had a small majority against unionization; both votes were ruled inconclusive.

For three years, a bitter battle was waged between Mahony and union organizers, with accusations of intimidation and harassment coming from both sides. The cardinal produced videos in Spanish to show to the workers that accused the union of anti-Catholic rhetoric. He said union organizers were disrespecting the families and privacy of cemetery workers by soliciting for membership at their homes.

A lawsuit was filed against Mahony to allow a third vote. Mahony spoke at an anti-union rally held outside the archdiocese's downtown offices before the election. This time, workers voted decisively against the union.

Mahony says he was never against the union, simply against the ways that particular election was being conducted. He still maintains that workers were harassed into voting for the union.

"My one insistent point was that the workers be allowed to decide by secret ballot," Mahony said. "But the local organizers decided to make it into an anti-Catholic campaign, and these are all very good Catholics who are very active in the church. The union defeated themselves."

While Mahony believes the dispute is water under the bridge, bitterness still exists in some quarters.

"Do I trust him personally? No," Mejia said. "But in a union, we have fights with employers all the time, sometimes with bitter strikes. We build relationships with (those businesses) as well, and I don't look at this any differently as long as it helps the labor movement and the community."

In the years since the cemetery worker battle, Mahony has largely stayed under the media radar screen when it comes to union activities. But that doesn't mean he hasn't been active.

"We worked with him behind the scenes about the living wage ordinance and we've worked with people in the archdiocese about many issues, like sweatshops," Janis-Aparicio said. "I think the cardinal is very careful and very deliberate, and recently he's taken more and more of an open stance in support of justice."

Others agree that Mahony has become a more visible force today than he was a few years ago.

"I am sure he has wanted to (get more involved with the labor movement) for the last five years, but because of the cemetery issue he has had to wait. He had to re-legitimize himself with the labor movement and labor leaders," Guerra said. "He sees that the future of the L.A. Archdiocese is with the Latino community. For all intents and purposes, he's a Latino stuck in a white guy's body. He is as good if not better than any Latino leading any Latino organization."

Before Mahony returned to Los Angeles in 1985 (he was born in Hollywood), he served in Fresno and Stockton. During this time he was chairman of the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Board and worked extensively with Cesar Chavez.

It is that legacy many of the Latino labor movement's leaders today prefer to remember, as opposed to the cemetery workers' dispute.

"I understand that he has used his influence to be helpful in a great number of conflicts," said Miguel Contreras, executive secretary/treasurer of the Los Angeles Federations of Labor. "He has a history on the side of poor immigrant workers - he presided over Cesar's funeral. Labor in L.A. went sour because of the issue of the cemetery workers, but we have other items on our agenda. We share a common vision."