http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/health/19union.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print
March 19, 2009 Two Unions, Once Bitter Rivals, Will Now Work Together By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Two of the nation’s fastest-growing labor unions — the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association — ended a bitter yearlong dispute on Wednesday by agreeing to work together to unionize hospital workers and push for universal health coverage.
For the last year, the two unions have viciously denounced each other, with the service employees accusing the nurses of sabotaging efforts to organize 8,300 hospital workers in Ohio, and the nurses’ union accusing S.E.I.U. officials of stalking and harassing its leaders.
“We have buried the hatchet,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Andrew Stern, the service employees’ president, said that at a moment when there is an unusual opportunity to push for a better health care system and a law that would make it easier to unionize workers, “we believe that our unions, together, can do far more in terms of accomplishing these goals than either of us can do on our own.”
For years there have been tensions between the two unions, which have competed to unionize registered nurses. The 1.8-million-member service employees’ union represents 80,000 nurses, while the California association represents 85,000 nurses. But the California association will soon become the largest nurses’ union in American history, with 150,000 members, when it merges with United American Nurses and the Massachusetts Nurses Union.
As part of their agreement, the service employees and the California nurses say they will seek to unionize many hospitals around the country, concentrating on the nation’s largest hospital systems. Nurses from those hospitals would generally join the nurses’ union while the other employees would join the S.E.I.U. In Florida the two will create a joint union of registered nurses.
“We spent a lot of time watching each other and at times competing with each other, and now we think it’s the right time to work together,” Mr. Stern said.
Their agreement calls for coordination in contract talks and in urging legislation to make it easier to unionize, and for measures that allow states to adopt single-payer health care systems. The two unions also agreed to refrain from efforts to displace each other at various workplaces.
Last March, the California nurses, asserting that the S.E.I.U. had negotiated a sweetheart deal, sent dozens of organizers to Ohio to block the service employees’ effort to unionize at nine Roman Catholic hospitals there. That caused the service employees to suspend that effort.
Several weeks later, several busloads of service employee members crashed a conference in Michigan where they confronted leaders and members of the California Nurses Association.
Just two months ago, Ms. DeMoro called the service employees “the new poster child for bad union behavior” and said that, compared with the corrupt Teamsters of old, the “S.E.I.U. makes them look like choirboys.”
Ms. DeMoro said her comments had been made in the heat of battle. She said her union would work with the nurses from the service employees with a goal of creating a single, nationwide union for registered nurses.
“We have a moment to seize,” she said. “We have to show hospitals that health care reform is the right thing to do.”