Fisher Island Liberation Day a Huge Success!
With more than 200 community members demonstrating in support of Fisher Island workers last Saturday, we were able to bring a message of justice to Fisher Island and hope to Fisher Island workers struggling to support their families and facing discrimination on a daily basis.
Please see the following press coverage of the day as well as photos from the action and a short video which captures the challenge of swimming to shore and the excitement of marching through the island.
While we as members of the community were denied access to the public marina slip, we did make it to the beach and even found the public pathway to the ferry. Once at the ferry as you will see in the video, we were not allowed to board to safely exit the island and were forced to swim back to our boats.
The workers are excited that we made it to shore and want to continue bringing the community presence as often and loudly as possible until Fisher Island addresses the abusive treatment workers face and improve the conditions on the island.
View the photos from the day of action: http://www.flickr.com/photos
Watch the Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
Media Coverage:
1. “Finding Way to Fisher Island” Miami Herald. By Nicholas Spangler 11/18/07
2. “Fantasy Island’s super-rich face upstairs, downstairs rebellion” The Times. By Jacqui Goddard. 11/19/07
3. “Downtrodden Workers Dirty on the Filthy Rich of Fantasy Island” The Australian. (Crosspost of The Times article by Jacqui Goddard) 11/20/07
4. NBC6 coverage. Reporter Ian Wood. 11/17-11/18 http://media.vmsnews.com
5. World Have Your Say. BBC blog. “Fisher Island” 11/19/07
6. Other blog hits include: “The Union News,” “Critical Miami,” “Miamism,” “Stuck on the Palmetto,” and “Community Benefits Coalition” all link found here.
7. Rustbelt Radio. Pittsburgh, PA. 11/20/07 Interview regarding action and campaign. http://pittsburgh.indymedia
8. Radio Caracol. Miami. 11/20/07 Interview regarding action and overall campaign.
Finding way to Fisher Island
November 18, 2007
BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER
For over a year the Service Employees International Union has been trying to organize the 360 housekeepers, groundskeepers and security guards of Fisher Island, a private community so exclusive you can only get to it by yacht, helicopter or private ferry.
The Fisher Island Community Association (FICA), responsible for maintaining the island's common areas, ferries and island security, argues its employees -- who earn an average of $13.81 an hour -- don't want or need a union, and has fought to keep the SEIU out.
The fight has involved arresting protesters off the MacArthur Causeway, until recently the closest they could get; an incident aired on YouTube.com about a stolen SEIU banner; and the Ferarri driver who allegedly called a ferry operator a peasant.
But on Saturday afternoon came the invasion.
Nine vessels took off from Jimbo's, the bar on Virginia Key, and steered as close to the island as the law permits. Thirty swimmers swam to shore, unfurled their protest banners and started a racket.
Chants of Justice Now! and ¡Si, se puede! echoed off the $5 million condominiums as they never had before. Airhorns exploded, megaphones blurted.
SEIU lawyers had found a way onto the island. Turns out the beach in the most exclusive community in South Florida, composed of sugar-white sand imported from the Bahamas, is public.
Not only that: the covenant developers made with the county years ago seems to guarantee public right of way on a pathway leading from the ferry landing to the beach.
''It feels good to be back,'' said Wisly Jonatas, a security guard who says he was fired earlier this month for violating island policy on the ferry -- walking through the residents' parked cars to get to the employee cabin, an action forbidden because of the danger to the cars' paint jobs.
''They're nice cars,'' said Jonatas, who now works at the Port of Miami. ``Mercedes, Bentleys. But I was tired.''
Yellow plastic tape lined the beach, behind which stood dozens of security guards, Miami-Dade police and residents, some with cameras, some in golf carts designed to look like Bentleys. There were few smiles and no words exchanged.
When the swimmers walked down the beach toward the public access path, security guards kept pace. More waited at the path, which turned out was not much of a path at all: more yellow tape had been laid down on walkways and on the side of Fisher Island Drive, too narrow for two people to walk comfortably.
It did, per the law, extend to the ferry landing. Almost. The tape ended outside the security office. This created a bottleneck of sandy-footed chanting protesters. More residents in fancy golf carts showed up, including one woman wearing a three-quarter length fur coat and a fur hat. She drove a cart painted in tongues of flame, that looked like a dragster.
Mark James, FICA president, emerged from the security office and after discussion allowed the protesters to continue to the ferry landing. The path should have, after all, extended to the ferry terminal area -- James grudgingly admitted as much in a recent letter to the union, which you can read online at MiamiHerald.com -- but there would be no ferry ride back to land. The protesters turned around, walked back out to the beach and swam out to the boats that had brought them. Nobody was arrested.
It seems the covenant provided for a public access path, but no actual access; the path is a path to nowhere.
''That's correct,'' said Jose Cancela, a public relations man recently hired by FICA, later that afternoon.
Cancela didn't feel much had been accomplished. A publicity-hungry union had chosen a fat target, the richest community in the United States, populated by people who are sensitive, if not to the cause of social justice, then at least to the cause of their own quality of life and their privacy; but they'd only mustered 30 protesters, some flown in and some high school students.
''It's obvious that the employees are very happy,'' he said. ``They were fully guaranteed every right [to protest] and they chose not to.''
This was almost true. Housekeeper Marette Casseus came to see the boats off but didn't swim, because she injured her knee in an accident at work in the summer. She'd been making $8.50 at the time. 'Nobody ever called me, even one day, to ask me, `Marette, how do you feel? How are you?' They proved to me they don't care.''
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Fantasy Island’s super-rich face upstairs, downstairs rebellion
November 19, 2007
Jacqui Goddard in Miami
It is America’s wealthiest postcode – 216 acres of tropical gorgeousness and palatial living reachable only by private ferry, yacht or helicopter.
Surrounded by sand imported from the Bahamas, planted with orchids and palms brought from the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, and a-twitter with the sound of caged toucans and macaws that enjoy daily outings with a bird walker, Fisher Island is known as Fantasy Island. So monied are residents of the enclave, three miles off Miami, it is said that if you waved at everyone you saw in a ten-minute drive there, you would have waved at more than $1 billion (£500 million).
But those who tend its manicured lawns and golf course, guard its residents’ riches, shine their Bentleys and Lamborghinis and wash their champagne glasses for as little as £40 a day, have had enough.
In a case highlighting the upstairs, downstairs hierarchy, its mainly black and Hispanic workers accuse management and some home owners of racial discrimination, abusive treatment and unfair wages.
“When you have the super-rich who can have a little isolated fantasy island of their own, they unfortunately develop a plantation mentality, and that’s what the workers are dealing with; people who see them as workers, not as human beings,” said Magdaleno Rose-Avila, executive director of Interfaith Workers Justice, an advocacy group.
Fisher Island is the epitome of the growing divide between rich and poor, says the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and it has become the battleground for a workers rights campaign.
Claiming that their dignity and human rights have been violated, the SEIU and 19 employees have filed a class-action complaint with the Miami-Dade County Equal Opportunity Board alleging, in particular, that Fisher Island’s private ferry service, which makes the 15-minute trip to and from the mainland, exercises segregationist policies. “There is terrible discrimination on that ferry. When you get on, it’s whites on one side, blacks on the other,” Mariette Casseus, a housekeeper, said.
While residents relax in an air-conditioned lounge, employees must spend the trip in a separate room whose cooling system is often broken, they say. If they do not board the ferry before residents have driven their cars on, they are not allowed to squeeze past the vehicles to reach their room because they might sully the bodywork with smudges or fingerprints.
“Rather, the employee passengers are forced to stand under an outside awning that fails to protect them from heavy rain, debilitating heat, severe wind and ship fumes,” the complaint alleges. Seshma Sheth, of the Miami Workers Centre, said: “We are seeing two Americas, we are seeing two different worlds and Fisher Island typifies that. To get on that ferry, it’s basically taking a trip back in time. You are going back to a racist and backward time . . . We market Miami as a city of the future and then we have this island that’s just a throwback to our past.”
The first owner of Fisher Island - created by dredging the sea off Miami Beach in 1905 – was Dana Dorsey, south Florida’s first black millionaire.
In 1925, it was bought by William Kissam Vanderbilt, a member of one of America’s wealthiest families, who built a winter estate that is now a luxury hotel.
The public are not allowed on to the island unless invited and the privacy of its mainly white residents – largely financiers, corporate executives and property barons with little public name recognition who live there part-time – is fiercely guarded. Aides to the President of Venezuela, who visited in the 1980s, commented that it was easier to gain access to the White House than to Fisher Island.
Oprah Winfrey, Julia Roberts, Boris Becker, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, the founder of the Samsonite luggage empire and the heir to the Bacardi rum fortune have all, at some time, had homes there.
The latest census, in 2000, gave the population as 467 and the island operates as a private club where cash is not required, just a membership card. It has eighteen tennis courts, two marinas and a heliport. Some residents are even rumoured to have paid for separate apartments for pampered pets.
The island’s management says that it works hard to address workers’ issues. But in a protest staged at the weekend, 100 SEIU activists “invaded” Fisher Island’s exclusive beaches to protest against the community’s perceived social failings. “Because they are so isolated, Fisher Island residents think they can wall themselves off from the poverty they create,” Hiram Ruiz, an SEIU representative, said. “We set out to make a point: there should be only one Miami, not one Miami for the wealthy and another for the rest of us.”
Island strife
$17.5m cost of a 8,300 sq ft seaside property
$236,000 average income per capita
467 number of residents
51 average age of residents
0.3 size in square miles of Fisher Island
Source: Times database, fisherisland.com
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Downtrodden workers dirty on the filthy rich of Fantasy Island
Jacqui Goddard, Miami | November 20, 2007
IT is the US's wealthiest postcode - 87.5ha of tropical gorgeousness and palatial living reachable only by private boat or helicopter.
Picture: AFP
(Repost of The Times article in The Australian found here)
BBC Blog: World Have Your Say
Monday, November 19, 2007
http://worldhaveyoursay
Fisher Island
America’s wealthiest area (once home to stars like Oprah Winfrey, Jula Roberts, Robert De Niro) has come under the spotlight…Fisher Island, better known as Fantasy Island is in the midst of a racial segregation row…Workers who are employed by wealthy residents on the Island say they are being discriminated against.
Http://www.timesonline.co.uk
In 2007 should these workers made to feel like second class citizens just because they are not as wealthy? Or is this kind of divide inevitable because of the wealth divide? Is Fisher Island being left behind the rest of America because of it’s racial practice?
The Union News
“SEIU organizers boat, swim to class-warfare protest”
http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2007/11/seiu-organizers-boat-swim-to-class.html
(Posted Herald article. )
Critical Miami
http://criticalmiami.com/
(Posted Herald article. )
Stuck on the Palmetto
“Fisher Island Protests”
http://stuckonthepalmetto
(SOTP featured the Herald article, the resident snatching the sign you tube clip and the short youtube clip of the beach invasion with promises to cover more. )
Community Benefits Coalition
“Boatloads of Activists”
http://www.developmentthatworks
(Video of invasion)
On November 17th, 2007, several boatloads of activists pulled up to Fisher Island in Miami-Dade County, the wealthiest zip code in the country; an island accessible only by boat or ferry.
The activists, organized by Service Employees International Union, hopped off the boats and swam up to the exclusive and segregated beaches of Fisher Island, which under Florida law is open to the public.
Then they marched through the public-funded streets of Fisher Island, demanding better treatment and wages to the workers who clean and maintain the buildings on the island.
Miamism
“Fisher Island Invasion Update”
http://www.miamism.com/2007/11
1 comment:
Photos courtesy of Carlos Miller at Magic City Media. You can see all of his photos of this event at his flicr site here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlosmiller/sets/72157603237226769/
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