There is melodramatic chatter here about who’d be the properly distinguished Democrat to amble over to the White House and tell the president it’s time to pack it in.
Forget about a politician. Just send John Fitch, chief lobbyist for the National Funeral Directors Association.
In a town of big-money, elaborate arm-twisting operations, Fitch, 56, and colleague Paul Miller, 29, comprise the modest cadre of soldiers for practitioners of a dismal trade. They do what most other lobbyists in this town do–shake hands, make connections, press legislation, attend fundraisers–though their arrival tends to have an inescapably different air.
“There’s always a lot of curiosity, with congressmen wondering, `Why do you want to meet with me?’ ” Fitch said Friday.
For a very old and unavoidable business, the nation’s roughly 53,000 funeral directors are late to the Washington lobbying game.
Though the NFDA, which is the industry’s major 20,000-member association has been alive and well (no pun intended) and headquartered in Milwaukee since 1882, it did not set up a capital lobbying operation until a mere 18 months ago.
Fitch asserts this has something to do with funeral directors “by nature not being very confrontational. They’re empathetic, good listeners and have been active politically in their communities, but just not lobbying.”
That changed dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the industry, which was the subject of author Jessica Mitford’s critical 1963 classic, “The American Way of Death,” faced increasing regulatory scrutiny, particularly from the Federal Trade Commission.
Not only was there the consumer-driven push from the FTC for more candor and itemization of prices for services, but the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration raised their own job and health-related questions about industry operations.
Meanwhile, a multi-billion-dollar business made up largely of mom and pop concerns (and distinctly segregated racially in big cities) saw the coming of larger firms, such as Service Corporation International of Houston, the Loewen Group of Vancouver, B.C. and Stewart Enterprises of New Orleans.
Their buying power enabled them to get caskets and chemicals cheaper, though there’s no evidence of dropping prices as the big three now control about 20 percent of the industry. Funerals tend to cost around $6,000 in many areas and firms are wary of advertising on the basis of price, fretting that consumers may equate such ads with lower quality.
On the more local and regional levels, longtime competitors are increasingly joining up, in part to cut costs; for example, in the number of limousines they have.
At the same time, the industry is adjusting, in ways it could never have imagined, to demands of a growing clientele, Baby Boomers. Increasingly, they have unusual requests. But to use a frustrating rhetorical device beloved by a particular Washington Post financial columnist, more about that (and Elvis impersonators) later.
The association is still a small fry when it comes to its political action committee, having distributed $130,428 during the last election cycle (favoring Republicans by a 2-1 margin since, says Fitch, “the reality is that they’re in charge”) and is hoping to double that this season. By comparison, the trial lawyers dispensed $3.5 million and the Service Employees International Union threw around $1.3 million.
Like the rest, the industry has its issues, as one learns in its magazine, The Director. The current issue includes, “Guidelines for Handling Third-Party Caskets” and promotes these stories in the next issue: “Embalming,” “Trauma Embalming” and “Ethics in the Preparation Room.”
It seeks bankruptcy law reform to make it tougher to declare bankruptcy. That’s no surprise since funeral homes often will extend credit, then get left in the lurch. It also wants to reduce the estate tax bite when businesses are transferred from one family member to another.
It is facing off with both the EPA and OSHA on various matters involving the discharge of wastes into sewers and septic systems, the handling of embalmed bodies with contagious diseases, wage and hour rules (overtime pay) for workers and worker exposure to embalming fluids.
As for bills which have passed the Senate and House and whose separate versions are now being confronted in so-called House-Senate “conferences,” a Defense Department bill includes a provision to provide a military detail at the funerals of many veterans; a Labor/Health and Human Services bill would exempt funeral directors and embalmers from certain wage and hour laws; and a third bill would prompt a study of whether cemeteries and retail casket makers should be covered by the same Federal Trade Commission rules as funeral directors.
Then there’s a proposal the association is pushing to broaden the number of veterans eligible for government-paid white cemetery headstones or a bronze star marker. They cost $75 apiece to the government but eligible veterans get them only if buried in national, state or military post cemeteries. Nearly 540,000 veterans passed away last year and about half received government-paid markers.
Together, all these challenges seem ample.
But Fitch and Miller indicate that the really big question for the industry, as much as the evolving competition inspired by the mega-firms, is this: how to deal with the deaths of Boomers. As Fitch put it, “They’re a new creature since they generally tend to be better-educated, more financially secure and want more creative funerals.”
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For the funeral director, the Boomers are self-indulgent and unique. They may actually want an Elvis impersonator at their funeral–or to be buried, somehow, in their Lexus.
Miller cited the funeral of a New York Boomer who insisted she be buried in her beloved Corvair (whose safety problems made a then-unknown consumer activist, Ralph Nader, famous in his battles with General Motors Corp.).
“The funeral director had a very tough time getting the car properly sized, getting a specialty vault, getting body work done on the car,” said Miller.
“But this is exactly the sort of situation that our members were talking about at our last convention,” said Fitch.
In addition, one is finding virtual memorials on the Internet. Funeral directors put up Web pages so relatives can put up pictures and anecdotes about their loved one. So, right next to “casket, $4,000” on the service list, we may soon see, rather matter-of-factly, “really hip Web page, $500.”
Since they are in every congressional district, funeral directors are known to politicians (though just two congressmen are morticians, namely House Republicans Tom Bliley of Virginia and Mike Parker of Mississippi). And, clearly, they are unavoidable, as young Miller remarked recently to Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.).
He was in a receiving line at a Moseley-Braun fundraiser, right in back of a lobbyist for H&R Block. According to Miller, he underscored the obvious to the senator when it was his turn.
“I told her that we were the last two people you want to be in the middle of: death and taxes.”
On scandal in politics
Lanny Davis, a former White House lawyer who has been an aggressive Bill Clinton defender on any media outlet with a reach of 100 yards or more, has turned more cerebral, or merely academic, but without losing the Clintonesque suspicion of newsies.
According to a highly placed source (a student), he just started teaching a George Washington University journalism class titled, “Scandal, Damage Control and American Politics.”
At the opening session, my highly placed source informs, Davis showed “Absence of Malice,” the 1981 Sally Field-Paul Newman drama about a grossly naive and privacy-invading newspaper reporter (Field) who betrays a source and hits the sack with the subject of her articles, her headline-seeking editor and a savvy mob-tied businessman (Newman), who winds up duping the reporter.
Davis clearly felt this was an instructive flick about the modern media. Sorry, Lanny. Even with the much-publicized acts of media malfeasance (fiction-writing and plagiarizing columnists, among others), the movie offers as much insight into the press as “Air Force One” does into presidential travel.