Did Amazon's Elite Security Squad "Interfere with, Restrain," and "Coerce" Union Representatives?

According to Josh Eidelson at Salon, the Service Employees International Union says Amazon's security contractors, Security Industry Specialists, have been "intimidating" union representatives, "flouting both federal law and the e-commerce giant’s Code of Conduct."

In charges filed May 5 with the National Labor Relations Board, SEIU accuses SIS – a California-based company whose employees the union has long sought to represent – of illegally “attempting surveillance activity to interfere with, restrain, coerce employees” out of exercising their New Deal rights. SEIU alleges that members of SIS’ “Executive Protection” squad – the more elite division responsible for protecting Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — were recently deployed to follow SEIU staff and SIS security workers around Amazon’s Seattle campus as they tried to distribute a new SEIU leaflet to SIS and Amazon employees. More dramatically, SEIU and Young – the only current SIS employee featured on the leaflet – allege that one of the Executive Protection members confronted Young on May 1 to demand information about the leafleting.

Go read the whole article. Absolutely nobody should be surprised at this point to learn that Amazon is anti-union; the company has been battling with unions in Germany over working conditions and pay for years. And earlier this year, Time reported that Amazon "crushed" a union movement in Delaware. They're even testing their own delivery service, presumably in part because the other delivery services are union shops. Amazon has made no secret of the fact that they loathe unions. And why wouldn't they? The folks in South Lake Union are making plenty of money; they just don't want the peons out in the warehouses—or the schmucks charged with protecting Jeff Bezos—to have any.