Mr. Donahue criticized a tactic by Mr. Sweeney's union to block traffic on bridges in September in Washington to draw attention to its continuing campaign to organize janitors.

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.

Labor legend George Hardy got his start organizing janitors with Local 9, where he helped quickly grow its membership; improving wages, benefits and working conditions for the janitors who worked in San Francisco's office buildings.

After successful campaigns last year to organize janitors and other maintenance workers at several universities in South Florida, the Service Employees International Union has set its sights on Fisher Island, one of the most concentrated pockets of wealth in the nation.

The locals are merging to increase their bargaining power and speed efforts to organize nonunion janitors.

And the confrontational tactics he sometimes favors, as when he blocked bridges in Washington in organizing janitors there, have enraged politicians and the public.

For instance, the drive to gain industry-wide coverage across a large geographical base - i.e. to organise janitors not only within one building, but across a whole city, state and eventually all across the USA - or the advocacy of union mergers.

In February 2005, SEIU janitors began organizing at both Miami Beach condominiums, employed by Continental Group, as well as janitors working for the University of Miami.

More than at any other time in decades, religious leaders are making common cause with trade unions, lending their moral authority to denounce sweatshops, back a higher minimum wage and help organize janitors and poultry workers.

So his union is planning to take on poultry plants throughout North Carolina, much as Mr. Sweeney's union has been organizing office-building janitors, city by city.