Fisher Island Workers File Class Action Lawsuit (Video and Transcript)

ABOVE: Director SEIU and ONEMIAMINOW.ORG documentary video highlighting worker conditions on Fisher Island.

Nineteen workers have filed a class action lawsuit against Fisher Island Holdings, Inc. The complaint questions policies on the island-owned ferry that the workers must take to get to the island. Acording to the complaint…

• Workers are segregated on the ferry and not allowed access to the Resident’s Lounge nor, with a few exceptions, are they allowed to drive a vehicle onto the ferry.
• To prevent employee passengers from touching or brushing against the vehicles of residents and guests on the Island, Fisher Island prohibits employee passengers from accessing even their segregated ferry room unless they arrive on the ferry before the vehicles of other passengers begin loading onto the ferry. One worker was fired after he went to the employees’ segregated ferry room after vehicles were loaded onto the ferry.
• Employee passengers, including a woman who was six months pregnant, not permitted in the segregated ferry room are forced to stand under an outside deck awning, which fails to protect them from heavy rain, debilitating heat, severe wind, and ship fumes.
• Fisher Island residents have cursed at employee passengers who come close to the residents’ vehicles, saying things like “don’t f-cking touch my car.” When a resident became angry after missing her ferry, she yelled at a security guard who was working at the causeway ferry terminal: “F-ck you, you peasant. I’m going to make sure you get fired.”

Wake up, Fisher Island! - Video Transcript

Lukelle Dorsaint; Dishwasher: I work for Fisher Island for so long I make it beautiful. I don’t feel good because I am working for a long time. And they don’t pay me for the time; they don’t pay me for my seniority.

Carlos Lazlo; Worker: They ask us to make the island impeccably clean and do excellent work because the people are so nationally and internationally prominent. We are not complaining about that. We are simply asking for our rights.

Marleine Bastien, FANM, Haitian Women of Miami: We are here in the City of Miami. We call it the City of the extreme. Why, because in the City of Miami you have the richest people in the US and the poorest.

Title Card: About one in five Miami children live in poverty

FR. Frank corbishley; So. Florida Interfaith Workers Justice: Fisher Island as you know is the richest zip code in the Nation.

Sushma Sheth; Miami Workers Center: We’re seeing two Americas. We’re seeing two different worlds, and Fisher Island typifies that, it’s actually an island it’s completely unrestrained itself off and it creates its own realty of order.

Magdaleno Rose-Avila; Exec. Director, So. Florida Interfaith Workers Justice: What this is about in Fisher Island is a Human Rights struggle for the very basic human rights of the workers.

Lukelle Dorsaint; Dishwasher: I came here thinking I was going to make a better life for myself and family. I started working at Fisher Island when I was thirty-seven years old. How can I leave and find another job. I am old now. I have given my life to Fisher Island. I give my life for nothing because they don’t pay me very well.

Marleine Bastien, FANM, Haitian Women of Miami: It is unacceptable in this day and age that workers are working long hours and they are unable to make ends meat.

Steve Weinstein; Chef: I make more than most workers on the island, but even with that I can’t afford a home in Miami, and I’d like to own a home and have that financial security.

Title Card: Out of all major U.S. cities, Miami has the highest degree of housing inequality.

Yeah, you’re working really hard. Sometimes I can’t move my back. That’s six rooms (per unit). I get so tired.

Claircina Estimphille; Housekeeper: Once I had this problem while taking my co-worker. A resident heard us speaking in Creole. And he told me to stop talking. He told me if I didn’t shut up with my talking I would be fired. They treat us like animal. You’re not animal you’re human being, right?

Mariette Casseus; Housekeeper: There is a terrible discrimination on the ferry. When you get on the ferry it’s whites on one side, blacks on the other.

Claircina Estimphille; Housekeeper: If the cars get on the ferry before you, you can’t get on.

Title Card: Recently, the island instituted a new rule: workers would no longer be allowed to sit in their designated lounge once cars were boarded, but residents would be escorted to the residents-only lounge.

Worker: We’ve worked so hard for eight hours, and we can’t go to our room that is sometimes air-conditioned, although the majority of times there is no air-conditioning there. If the resident cars are already on board we can’t pass by to go to our room.

Sushma Sheth; Miami Workers Center: Get on that ferry and it’s basically taking them on a trip back in time, you’re going back to a racist and backward time. It’s ironic in a city like Miami that positions itself as a city of the 21’s Century with a majority of people of color and minorities living in a city with a vibrant economy a gateway to the Americas all of these ways we market Miami as a city of the future, and then you have this island that just a throwback to a past that should have been left way back when.

Title Card: Recently, two security guard have been fired for speaking out

Junior Francois; Security Guard: The guy in the Ferrari is constantly an abusive guy. With me, had missed them ferry. So like when he missed the ferry, he told me to call the ferry back an he asked me to call the ferry back and I told him I couldn’t and I told him I couldn’t . So he began shouting all types of curse words. An he tuned around before my supervisor showed up and called me a peasant. He called me a peasant. You know you guys work for me, you gotta do what I say to do. You peasant.

Title Card: Fisher Island management fired Junior for calling attention to repeated racial slurs directed at workers.

Wisley Jonatas; Fired Security Guard: Don’t take it as an isolated incident. It happened to me and it can happen to you, too. There’s a new (ferry) policy that’s come out and if you do not follow the policy they will do the same thing to you they did to me. So it’s your right for you to stand up, and you tell them the policy is unfair.

Title Card: Wisley was fired for protesting that the new ferry policy was unfair

Magdaleno Rose-Avila; Exec. Director, So. Florida Interfaith Workers Justice: What has happened is when you have the super-rich who can have a little Fantasy Island of their own. They develop, unfortunate, and plantation mentality and that’s what the workers are dealing with who see them as their workers, not as human beings, not as honoredablt people, and what we need to do is turn that around.

Dr. Martin Luther King; March on Montgomery, 1968: And all the world knows that we are here, that we are standing before the forces of power in the State of Alabama saying we ain’t going let nobody turn us around

Worker: They don’t give you freedom. You have to fight for it

Worker: If we workers can come together to gain power and unite like the leader out in California, Cesar Chavez, that great leader of the Latino struggle in the United States.

Cesar Chavez; Grape boycott, 1980’s: As long as there is strength in our bodies then our strength will be used to fight for this great cause.

Worker: Like the University of Miami where they won. Why? Because they raised up everyone, and we have to do the same.

Title Card: Janitors in Miami went on a hunger strike to protest unfair working conditions, and won.

Worker: I want everybody change, everything change, that’s not easy you know.

Worker: Even though we are cleaners I want them to treat us with respect. Just like you would show respect to anyone.

Steve Weinstein; Chef: We’re determined, but it’s a question of waking people up and telling them they have a voice. They can control their workplace more.

Workers (Singing): Freedom, they don’t give it to you. Freedom, you have to die for it. Freedom, you have to fight for it.

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"Fisher Island Workers File Class Action Lawsuit (Video and Transcript)"

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