The Wackenhut Corporation (“Wackenhut” or “the Company”) today filed a civil action against the Service Employees International Union (“SEIU” or “the Union”). The lawsuit is in response to the SEIU’s malicious, four-year, international corporate campaign to force Wackenhut to recognize the Union as the employees’ bargaining representative while denying the employees their federal rights to free choice and a secret ballot election. The SEIU’s top-down, wholesale, organizing attack also would compromise the quality of Wackenhut’s services by forcing the Company to deal with a union that also represents workers other than guards which federal law specifically prohibits as an appropriate unit for representation and bargaining.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit alleges violations of the federal Racketeering Influenced Corporations Act, 18 U.S.C. section 1961 et seq., and seeks injunctive relief, treble compensatory damages and costs.

The Wackenhut Corporation is the leading provider of security and security-related services in the U.S. Additional information about Wackenhut is available on its Internet site at http://www.Wackenhut.com.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has a story this morning that does a great job summing up a complex issue:

The company, which provides security at many of the U.S.’s nuclear-power plants, says it has refused to recognize SEIU because it is a “mixed” union that admits janitors, hospital workers and other service workers in addition to security guards, according to the lawsuit. It said it recognizes and negotiates collective-bargaining agreements with “guard-only” unions, except for three situations in which Wackenhut obtained contracts at work sites where mixed unions were already in place.

Wackenhut and its subsidiaries are parties to about 35 collective-bargaining agreements with six guard-only unions, according to the complaint.

See more about the case against SEIU’s ally, the United Food and Commercial Workers.