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 history-making landing put a public face on Fisher Island's "separate, but equal" mentality regarding the workers who service the island and the public. The "public" are not allowed on to the island unless invited and the privacy of its mainly white residents is fiercely guarded.

Until last week, the beach of Fisher Island was thought to be off-limits.

For over a year the SEIU Local 11 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 union organizers couldn't get close enough to the workers on the island to even talk with them. Attempts to enter the island have resulted previously in arrests.

In fact, workers are not allowed to walk freely on the island at all. They are expected to walk along only specified paths and usually are expected to be accompanied by "escorts" or officials.

Last Saturday, all that began to change with the bold invasion.

Nine vessels steered as close to the island as the law permits. Thirty of the one hundred activists swam to shore, unfurled their protest banners and started chanting, "Justice! Now!" and "¡Si, se puede!"

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.

The SEIU lawyers and organizers had finally found their way onto the forbidden island to join with the embattled employees. Now, as truth surfaces and arrests did not materialize, we learned that the Turner Island beach is a public beach, after all, and not set aside for the ultra wealthy inhabitants of this, the most exclusive community in South Florida.

For example, last month, a security guard who works on the island, Wisly Jonatas, had been arrested for taking a short cut.

Evidently, this worker had walked from the ferry platform through the parking lot in order to reach his employee cabin. When arrested, he was informed that walking near the cars of the wealthy islanders was prohibited by island policy because islanders wished to avoid damage to their cars - Mercedes, Bentleys and other high end cars.

On this day, the union organizers and attorneys that had swam to shore were not being permitted to walk along the beach and public access paths. The protesters turned around, walked back out to the beach and swam out to the boats that had brought them. Nobody was arrested.

So much is coming to light now. As it turns out, there isn't a law that prevents employees from walking in proximity to islanders' cars, even though law enforcement behaved as if the law existed. Furthermore, a public access path encircles the island and the beach is public - facts that the workers had also not been made aware of. Although island ordinance provided for a public access path, but no actual access; the path is a path to nowhere as it doesn't give the workers access to the places they need to walk to. On the day of the protest, the island authorities had ribboned the "path to nowhere" off to prevent the protesters from walking along even that path.

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...

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 Times)