Noted.

HATFIELDS ❤ McCOYS: It's been a year of labor feuds, culminating in SEIU's recent decision to trustee United Healthcare Workers West, a mighty, militant California local, and a move by UNITE, the garment workers union, to break off from UNITE-HERE. Then in mid-March, white flags shot up in one of the hottest of these wars between workers.

Just months ago, top officials at SEIU, the massive service employees union that represents hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers, tended to spit when they spoke about the California Nurses Association (CNA), calling it "elitists" (for organizing only nurses) and antiunion "reactionaries" (for trying to defeat SEIU organizing drives in hospitals where CNA wanted the nurses for itself). CNA director Rose Ann DeMoro, poised to head the largest national nurses' organization in history, bitterly denounced SEIU's "business unionism," which turned workers into "commodities" and gave away the farm to employers and politicians on patient-to-staff ratios and healthcare reform. Yet on March 19, the two unions, which had gone toe-to-toe in hospitals in Ohio and Nevada, announced a joint organizing accord. Now they'll go after nonunion hospitals together, with CNA organizing the nurses and SEIU the rest of the healthcare staff.

"The election of Barack Obama and the opportunity to transform our healthcare system, combined with the opportunity to give more healthcare workers a voice through passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), seems so profound, such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that it made the leadership of both organizations feel there were more significant things to do than continue our competition," SEIU president Andy Stern told The Nation.

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