SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ended a year-long fight with the state's nurses' union, one of his fiercest critics, after getting chastened at the ballot box, officials said on Friday.
The California Nurses Association has hounded Schwarzenegger since he suspended a measure making California the first U.S. state requiring a specific ratio of nurses to hospital patients.
Now that measure stands. Late on Thursday, California's attorney general withdrew Schwarzenegger's appeal of a judge's ruling against him in the staffing fight.
The 58,000-member California Nurses Association said the legal retreat was a result of pressure nurses had put on the celebrity governor.
"We have been extended an olive branch," Rose Ann DeMoro, the group's executive director told reporters. "For us it is a tremendous victory."
The move comes after California voters rejected all eight initiatives in Tuesday's special election that Schwarzenegger had called in a bid to circumvent the Democrat-dominated legislature. One measure would have limited the ability of unions to contribute to political causes.
A contrite Schwarzenegger pledged on Thursday to work with Democratic legislators, unions and others.
"I am not anti-union," he said. "I will also get together and contact all the union leaders and let them know that I want to work with them."
'I KICK THEIR BUTT'
The original staffing regulations implemented in January 2004 set a ratio of one nurse to every six patients. It was to go to one nurse for every five patients a year later. But in November 2004 Schwarzenegger issued an emergency regulation keeping the one-to-six ratio.
The nurses' union responded by relentlessly picketing the Austrian-born Republican governor and fighting him in court.
Last December, Schwarzenegger added fuel to the fire by calling the nurses a special interest group and adding: "I kick their butt."
After the judge's ruling in March, California adopted the one-to-five ratio as the fight continued.
Health and Human Services Agency spokeswoman Sabrina Demayo Lockhart said the emergency regulation's expiration had prompted the withdrawal of the appeal, not Tuesday's election results.
She also said fears that a nursing shortage would lead hospitals to curtail services in an effort to meet the lower nurse-to-patients ratio had not materialized.
"We have had 10 months of experience with the court-mandated ratios to examine the impact, and the fact of the matter is hospitals are not telling us that they are closing their emergency rooms," he said.
"In fact, major hospitals have agreed to comply with the lower ratios in their labor contracts and publicly stated that they are meeting these ratios."
