I arrived in South Florida 10 years ago. It was not quite the voyage my grandparents took from Naples, Italy or  Istanbul, Turkey - but my journey was still quite the drive from Brooklyn to Palm Beach County. I came here like all other immigrants from the City – in search of the sunshine, bare bodies, and to be closer to whatever family was left and who had migrated years prior. While those goals were met, there were other things waiting for me that I did not expect. Things like severe racism, bigotry, and the clear unobstructed view of income inequality.

West Palm Beach is a short walk to the oldest money in the world on the island of Palm Beach and I would sit at the Intracoastal waterway wondering; how can people be so close and yet so far away from one another? There were only owners and workers – and the disparity between the two seemed longer and stranger than Broadway on a Thanksgiving Day parade. Even certain family members, who found a particular success in their careers, seemed to forget we were raised in a single-parent home in a housing project in Queens. Granted, we were poor but we never did without – but granted, someone’s mom worked two jobs to put the food out, pay the rent and clothe us. Florida just seemed to make people forget important things, a collective amnesia?

Growing up where I did was interesting in that we never knew we were poor; everyone around us was as well. The next neighborhood over was where Local 3 of the IBEW had its union hall, and those apartments were mostly occupied by journeymen and their families; and they were a step above than the folks in my area – but not by much, as far as I know.

If our families were not in the IBEW they were Teamsters. It seemed that unions and union jobs were what everyone wanted and needed once out of high school. It was what our parents thought was best. I worked once at a nonunion cane warehouse in Flushing, a job that was a hazard in every way imaginable. My tenure there was brief and I ended up loading and unloading moving trucks, remembering the horror in my mother’s eyes hearing that I carried a refrigerator strapped to my back that “an old-timer taught me how to balance.” My job list is endless – but the point is that I respected work and worked at places that respected me, and mostly because the majority of the jobs back then had a structure, a benefits package, a contract, and co-workers who looked out for one another.

All of my earlier work experience before the ripe-old age of 30, when I got here to sunny South Florida, might as well have been thrown out the big metaphoric window, including the Army-like insanity of loading double-wide UPS trailers in Maspeth.

In South Florida there is no sense of honor in one’s work – at least that I have seen. You have to own a company, be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or live off a trust fund -- so it seems, to walk with your head held high. Clearly that is only how it seems, and there are workers here, I see them every day of the week – and I have no idea how high their heads are in the sky. I see the workers hauling trailers in and out of the ports or plowing down Interstate 95, they are building endless buildings for more wealthy people to show up, they are paving roads, and after hurricanes you see the workers climbing electrical towers or moving fallen trees around. All the workers here seem to be scattered and well- camouflaged. Fork it over to one man’s perception, but the workers here seem to care less about their work environments, their co-workers, and most people’s view of unions in Florida is filled with ignorance fueled by propaganda machines. For 10 years I have wanted to be wrong on my perception – to the point of seeing who in town, other than the postal workers and cops, had a union.

One teacher I know recently told me on the way to Orlando that she believes her union is “in bed with the school district to the point that if there were a work or labor issue, I would rather pay to get my own attorney than use the unions.” I didn’t know what to say. I thought about it for a minute and said she should run for an office – but even the overly idealistic words coming from my mouth seemed absurd. I think I switched the subject to some victories I heard about in Washington state or Minneapolis, I don’t recall.

What does it take to change people’s perceptions of labor? Does labor need to grow up a little, go to technology to organize its workers sitting on MYSPACE for hours on end? Perhaps we really need to do what we can at the top to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed into law – and then go about educating massive amounts of nonunion working people regarding their rights.

The idea of educating workers means talking to them, and that seems to be a labor that labor hasn’t been able to deal with too well in the past. When unions bolted from the AFL-CIO in 2005, rumor has it that not one rank-and-file member was told, asked to give an opinion, or Heaven help us, vote – it just happened. As another friend of mine back in the old country- New York, says, “We learned just like everyone else, in the morning paper on the way to work that morning.” For a minute I thought, well, at least the papers covered it up there.

In South Florida it was probably covered as well, but I was stuck online and didn’t look for how the local media handled the story. I watched, instead, what was happening at Labourstart.org, Labornet.com and other labor-related sites. I wanted to see if anyone in labor, watching labor, being labor – would cry foul, and many did; I did.

I took on the mission of informing workers of everything that I possibly could get my hands on in my free time as I tried to get jobs with local unions in Florida, in NY and I think I sent a few resumes to California. I had one interview – but the union said it had to “re-allocate its funds,” and thanked me for my interests. I guess I just don’t have the skill-set to organize or communicate with workers – the same skill-set that I used for most my professional life at both unionized and nonunion shops.

I have learned over time that not working directly with one union is the best thing that ever happened to me. It is not just the SEIU or the Teamsters, it is not just the NWU or the Carpenters that need people speaking out in support of labor, it is all of them – and even more importantly, it is for the people that are not yet organized, the workers in places like South Florida that have no understanding of labor laws. So, I applied recently to a job at the Florida State AFL-CIO, but I haven’t heard back yet. I also applied for a job with CTW – but I think that one was already taken before the ad was posted, at least that’s the inside rumor I am told. But this is not about me, its about a lot of conscious working people.

In South Florida the income inequality is ridiculous. The workers who labor in the wealthiest of neighborhoods earn the least, the janitors who clean some of the most expensive universities are living in poverty, and the roofers, the landscapers, etc., they are all working below standards that most of us in the Old Country would just shake our heads at, suck our teeth at, and thank some greater power that we are unionized. For those of us that are unionized, have fair representation and an equal quality of life to that of our labors – we should, somehow try to close the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. Though I am sure this will be debated a million ways to the beach, we are a contract away from being have-nots ourselves.

Once upon a time there were strong unions that grew stronger – and too many stories are circulating with wild concessions, substandard contracts, and union officials so intermingled with the bosses that members would rather hire their own attorney to handle a grievance. While that is one huge and on-going fight to have the unions belonging to the workers, there is another one …of equal, if not greater importance. That is the fight to organize in places like South Florida -- in communities like Fisher Island off Miami and Palm Beach, in Fort Lauderdale where endless retailers take advantage of young working people – most of whom don’t even know they are being taking advantage of or just gave up caring.

As the Employee Free Choice Act is debated in the Senate, and most of us are at work as usual, there is a bizarre reality that we should be prepared for. The EFCA will get a presidential veto. The Democrats will blame the current administration or the other side of the aisle, but in the end – those who need and want the EFCA now will have to wait a little longer.

In talking with some people about this I am told that we need to continue to organize online, get people motivated / educated, and share ideas – in other words, not to lose hope. One friend wrote saying that it should be as easy to join a union as it is to join a political party – but it is not. He went one to say that one can join the Army with greater ease than voting yes to be part of a union and having that vote heard.

It is a big job to spread the word of unions and the Employee Free Choice Act – especially in South Florida. In one respected local business journal there was an article that ran a few months ago in favor of the Nova Southeastern University workers. I called the journalist and told her what a great job she did with the story, thanked her, and told her that she should consider following that piece up with a story on the EFCA – she had no idea what the EFCA was or what it was all about.

Maybe labor needs a PR firm? Hell, I am for hire!