BeyondChron's Randy Shaw on union internecine warfare in California, (h/t J. Justin Wilson):

SEIU defeated NUHW by 233 votes in their bitter election over Fresno’s 10,000 home care workers, but now faces a situation analogous to the United States in Vietnam. It took nearly one thousand staffers and an estimated $10 million for SEIU to eke out a victory in Fresno, the labor equivalent of carpet-bombing...

SEIU’s Fresno campaign leader Dave Regan echoed Air Force leader General Curtis LeMay’s “total war” strategy toward the Vietnamese when he promised “to drive a stake through heart of the thing that is NUHW,” and “put them in the ground and bury them.” Regan insisted, “this is not an election that we want to win 52 to 48, or by a few hundred votes. We want them to believe when we are done here that it is hopeless. We got to give them a butt whipping they will never forget ... And a year from now or three years from now or five years from now we are all gonna sit back and say, 'I was there when we kicked those SOBs in Fresno County.'” But Fresno is more likely to be recalled as the place where NUHW survived SEIU’s “total war” strategy, leaving SEIU in a Vietnam-like quagmire.
...
NUHW and others have criticized SEIU for allegedly creating large bargaining units that do not train, educate or empower workers. Fresno appears to confirm that SEIU’s rush to get more workers under union contracts as the key strategy for gaining greater clout over national policies has come at a cost...This is the message that NUHW is taking from Fresno. As spokesperson Paul Kumar told me, “the election demonstrates that SEIU is a hollowed shell of a union. It spent $10 million, and still could barely win a majority of worker support.”

...None of these fights add to the ranks of unionized workers, while breaking the spirit of many union members caught in the crossfire.