ARE YOU KIDDING? Bury Your Dead.

Office clerks and salespeople took over the graveyard shift at several cemeteries across the region yesterday to make sure no caskets were left unburied when gravediggers hit the picket lines.

Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries rolled out its backup plan after 230 unionized workers at nine properties from Brampton to Oshawa walked off the job Wednesday night.

Union leader Willie Wham expressed his doubts at the skills of the replacement workers.
"They're not very good at it," said Wham, president of the Canadian Service Workers Union. "They don't have the experience that the cemetery service workers do. They won't be providing decent, dignified, respectful funerals the same way that our guys do."

Company spokesperson Rick Cowan said non-unionized workers and managers have been training on the backhoe for several months in case negotiations fell through.

"We are conducting the burials," Cowan said. Fourteen funerals are expected today at Mount Pleasant Cemetery alone.

Striking workers allowed funeral processions to pass through picket lines set up early yesterday at Beechwood Cemetery, Elgin Mills Cemetery, Meadowvale Cemetery, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Pine Hills Cemetery, Prospect Cemetery, Thornton Cemetery, Toronto Necropolis and York Cemetery.