SEIU goes into FL

there is an encalve in FL called fisher island, where the residents are richer than croesus. the SEIU found this a good area for organization, specifically by stephen lerner, a top SEIU organizer.

" “Workers everywhere have the same employers,” Lerner likes to say. Eventually he began to wonder whether there might be a place where he could shift that dynamic: a locale with wealthy residents and poor workers, and nothing in between. A place where a union like his could show the rich how easy it would be to propel the less fortunate into the rapidly disappearing American middle class.

Then, while organizing janitors at three Miami-area universities last year, Lerner began to hear talk of an island where people with stratospheric wealth were tended by workers making near poverty-level wages. Fisher Island, it seemed to Lerner, was the perfect microcosm of, and the perfect metaphor for, the growing divide between rich and poor, not just in Miami, but in South Florida, the U.S. and beyond. “This is not a traditional union campaign,” he told me of the struggle for Fisher Island. “This is a fight for what kind of world we are going to have.”

...

the S.E.I.U. is taking the organizing drive to the residents, trying to force them to see the invisible workers as human beings, with bills to pay and kids to educate. That, at least, was Plan A. Being somewhat naïve about the way the rich regard their riches, the union initially prepared a Power Point presentation on Miami’s economic divide that included an illustration showing that raising the salaries of 360 workers to $30,000 a year would cost island residents $3.4 million annually, equal to the cost of one yacht, 15 new Bentleys ($200,000 each) or 14 golf memberships ($250,000 each). Behind the good intentions and good humor — only $3.4 million! — was an implied threat. This was Plan B, which would consist of shaming the residents if they couldn’t be persuaded.

...

In the fall of 2006, the union began implementing Plan A — an appeal to the Fisher Island residents’ moral sense. The union called on local religious leaders and workers who had already helped in the university campaigns. At the union’s urging, two members of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice, the Rev. Frank J. Corbishley and Rabbi Rebecca Lillian, sent a letter in late November to every Fisher Island resident, asking them to support workers’ right to a union. “We are reaching out to you to begin a discussion on the lives of the janitors, maids, groundskeepers and other workers who loyally serve you every day,” the letter began, and went on to explain that these workers had to choose between paying bills or medical care and that they lived in crowded apartments, constantly fearing homelessness. The letter suggested the residents could make an enormous difference in the lives of those who suffered “serious and tragic poverty” in their midst.

The religious leaders waited, and waited, for a response. They got two. One was a fax offering help. The other missive said this: “We don’t want a union. We’re against organized crime.” "

the residents' association is led by a guy named marc james.

"James’s father was a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “I have great respect for unions in general,” he told me. “But at Fisher Island I don’t think we need one.” In his carefully chosen words, one can sense a man who is walking a fine line. The people on the island are “caring,” James said, and FICA and the Fisher Island Club, which employ about 600 workers, seek to pay “at market level or better” and offer good health insurance. The union is unfairly making a scapegoat of Fisher Island because of its “marquee appeal.” “If I were a union organizer,” James said, “I would target an affluent island and I would make speeches and allegations in order to support my primary goal to organize the island.” The real villains, he asserted, are not the residents, but the contractors and subcontractors who employ at least a quarter of the island’s workers.

...

Talking to James, I felt that I was being instructed in island paternalism: its governing boards can determine what’s best for the employees and they need no input from unions. “My father worked in a hierarchical company — a very large one — and the only way that his group could get attention was by being active with the union. That is not the case with the employee population on a 216-acre island with at times as many employees as owners.” The rigidity of union rules offends him. “I don’t believe that is healthy for the employees at large,” he said.

Like Lerner, James knows that unhappy workers make for unpleasant surroundings, and that a failure to attract good workers would be devastating to the island’s ambitions. “I intend to fix this and be vigilant because I do care about the workers and their quality of life,” James said. “I do want them in the middle class. I just don’t believe we need a union to get them there.” "

however, there's been anti-union retaliation.

"José Rojas, who had worked at one of Fisher Island’s restaurants for six years, was fired. Rojas, however, had attended the worker rally, and so his firing gave the S.E.I.U. the opening it needed to file charges with the National Labor Relations Board. In its complaint, the union accused island governing bodies of “illegally prohibiting workers from speaking about the union on work time, banning workers from access to the ferry area while off duty and for illegal threats of termination if employees sign a union petition.”

The organizers were thrilled that the battle had been joined. “I’m incredibly optimistic that we are at a turning point,” Stephen Lerner told me, speaking in macro, not micro terms. “If there’s enough money to pay someone to walk your bird, there’s enough money to pay for health care.” He’s planning more public actions. Maybe a barbecue on a Fisher Island Beach at low tide, when even private beaches in Miami become public. Maybe some faux pirate ships trawling the waters between Fisher Island and Miami Beach.

Whatever comes next, the moral crusade is catching on. Last month, the Fisher Island Community Association decided that its landscaping employees would all receive a starting salary of at least $10 an hour. “It was,” Mark James said, “the right thing to do.”