Expressing grave concern that the business of burying the island’s dead is unregulated and chaotic, operators of established funeral homes want the state to set guidelines for the industry, and rid it of ‘suitcase undertakers’ who now prey on grieving relatives.

.’Suitcase undertakers’ jostle for business

. Call for regulations, standards

“There. are no guidelines in Jamaica, so anyone can just get up and go open a place,” said chairman of the National Funeral Directors’ of Jamaica Renford Taylor, who owns Taylor’s Funeral Home in Kingston. “There is no one to report to, no one to inspect your place and say ‘here, you are a reputable undertaker so we’ll give you a licence to operate’.”

Ruel Madden, who runs Madden’s Funeral Home, one of the island’s most prominent establishments, also has similar concerns.

“It might sound crude, but just like a meat shop or a barbershop or hairdressers who need to be licensed to operate, mortuaries should be licensed too,” he said. “We’re trying to get them to regularise the funeral services industry by requiring a mortuary licence to operate.

To operate a mortuary, where you bring bodies into the parlour and have them prepared for burial by embalming and by other means, then people should be licensed for that.”

Now, facilities at funeral homes are only occasionally visited by health inspectors; but without licensing laws and the authority to enforce them, health officials can do little. According to the health ministry, they are moving to set and codify guidelines for the trade within the island’s 14 parish councils.

But no one at either the ministry’s Public Health Department or at the local authority for Kingston and St Andrew, the KSAC, would comment on the progress of any such legislation.

There was some effort made, about four years ago, Madden said, to put guidelines in place. The health ministry had asked recognised funeral homes for input, a green paper was prepared and was supposed to go before parliament.

Nothing has been heard about the issue since, said Madden who, like many of the morticians at established funeral homes, is licensed by an overseas institution. Those who operate outside of the system and make their living by hustling for customers, he added, have brought the industry into disrepute.

“They hang out by mortuary doors and the way they approach the bereaved people is appalling. The people are bereaved and they’re pushing business cards in their faces, saying, ‘you need an undertaker, you need an undertaker’,” Madden said.

“It brings the business down to a level of vultureism.”

The government’s April 2003 decision to begin collecting General Consumption Tax (GCT) from funeral homes, Taylor argued, had only made an already bad situation worse.

“When they brought the GCT on us, we told them it was going to cause chaos,” he said. “But they just put a blind eye to it. We just want it (the business) to be regularised, that means that everybody pays statutory deductions, and everybody who is in the business has (the requisite) facilities, because death can be a hazard.”

With the introduction of GCT on goods and services provided by those who bury the dead, many undertakers and funeral homes had simply drifted into the underground economy, industry players explained. They operate strictly on a cash basis, keep overhead costs low, and avoid the tax net, and are therefore generally able to undercut the price charged by legitimate businesses.

“We are not against anybody doing the work,” Taylor said “but we are not on one level play field because the state allows these people to beat the system.” On average, a funeral package at well-known establishments like Madden’s, Isaacs, Roman’s, or House of Tranquillity generally begins at about $120,000.

Depending on the lavishness of the ceremony, the price tag can run into millions of dollars. Most packages include removal and storage of the body, embalming, casket, vault, headstone, 100 printed programmes, and a wreath – plus GCT.

Suitcase undertakers offer roughly the same package, but can afford to charge much less. Most do not own their own facilities or equipment, and many are not trained morticians. Some rent spaces in the freezers of other funeral homes and store the bodies there.

Many hire hearses or use ordinary vans, and they are able to buy or arrange for coffins to be built at a fraction of the cost said to be paid by their more established competitors. There have been unconfirmed reports of dead bodies being dressed in the backs of vans or trucks parked on the side of the street, open and exposed.

Taylor is hoping that Kingston Mayor Desmond McKenzie will help.

The mayor has actively taken up the cause of the dignity of the dead as a central part of his tenure in office.

He has publicly pushed for the establishment of a public morgue in Kingston and is at the forefront of an effort to raise US$50 million for the revitalisation and maintenance of Kingston’s May Pen Cemetery. He did not return the Sunday Observer’s calls but Taylor is hoping he will have more luck.

“I am planning to call a meeting with the mayor,” Taylor said. “It’s very hard to get a moment of his time, but I’m trying. Right now, there’s nothing we can do, there is nothing we can do to stop them, but the way I see it being handled now, it’s not good.”