SEIU and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) today announced the signing of a transformative cooperation agreement.

The two unions will work together to organize hospital workers throughout the country who don't yet have a union voice, with CNA/NNOC as the leading voice for RNs, and SEIU as the leading voice for all other hospital workers.

With the opportunity to win the Employee Free Choice Act and healthcare reform just around the corner, both SEIU and CNA/NNOC recognized that their energy and resources would be better spent on uniting all healthcare workers -- instead of focusing on the issues that divide them. Although the two unions have not always seen eye-to-eye in the past, this new agreement puts an end to past conflicts and commits both unions to working together on issues that are most important to health care workers: bringing the power of collective bargaining to all health care workers and advocating for better health care jobs, staffing, and patient care. "It's much more than a truce," SEIU president Andy Stern told AP. "It's really trying to establish a partnership at a moment of profound change in our country."

As part of this agreement, neither union will interfere with the other's organizing campaigns or internal affairs--and will collaborate on future organizing in some of the nation's largest hospital systems. Together, SEIU and CNA/NNOC will create a new joint RN organization in Florida to represent current and future RNs of both unions in that state. In all other states, SEIU will continue to represent its current RN members in bargaining.

Given the challenges facing health care workers today, bringing together the strength of the nation's largest health care union and largest RN union to work towards increased union representation for healthcare workers will hugely assist efforts to enact genuine healthcare reform nationally and for measures that allow states to adopt single-payer health care systems. "Those who recognize our shared value of making sure registered nurses and other health care workers have not only a say but a critical role in helping reshape a failed system into something that actually helps people know that this is the right step to help us meet the challenge and the call of this moment," said Stern.