The high-flying PR machine for the Service Employees International Union ran into some trouble recently. First, we launched SEIUexposed.com to highlight some of the union officials’ worst abuses. Then The Wackenhut Corporation filed a RICO civil racketeering suit against the union for alleged extortionate behavior.

All this goes to suggest the tactics that have made SEIU one of the few unions to grow its membership have been successful only at the expense of being ethical. Here’s the take of the New Haven Register, which has covered a long fight between a local hospital and the union:

By now, New Haven should be thoroughly disgusted with the SEIU’s destructive tactics of trying to tarnish the hospital’s reputation and attempting to pit the community against it. The SEIU is now playing the same game in Bridgeport, trying to kill a land disposition agreement for the $1.5 billion redevelopment of Steel Point because the developer rejected union demands.

In New Haven, the union has spent 10 years and almost $2.3 million trying to organize the Yale-New Haven’s nonfood service workers. For all of that, it managed to collect the signatures of only 894 of the hospital’s 1,736 nonfood service workers in support of a union. If the election process had proceeded, that thin majority would likely have shriveled under hospital challenges.

This will not be the last denunciation of SEIU’s tactics.