Strange bedfellows comes up a lot this morning in coverage of the new alliance between Wal-Mart and the Service Employees International Union. SEIU may not have been the leading critics of the retail giant — that'd be their brothers and sisters in the UFCW — but the union has funded Wal-Mart Watch and in many places in the country, including here, is one of the most powerful and politically active unions.

The Washington Post led it's story this way:

Two once-implacable foes in the business world found common ground yesterday, at least for a few minutes, as they publicly pledged to work together for the first time to fix what they called the nation's health-care crisis by 2012.

At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott sat at one end of a table and vowed to put aside differences to "drive this debate forward." On the other end was Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and frequent Wal-Mart critic, declaring he had made a "tough choice" in the goal to improve coverage.

How this unlikely alliance came about illustrates the deepening concern that businesses, labor groups and lawmakers have over skyrocketing health-care costs.

It's important to note that the group of union, business and political leaders that appeared together in D.C. yesterday — I watched on a Web cast -- offered no specifics on how they would go about creating universal health-care coverage. All parties have agreed to these organizing principles.

But when you get Wal-Mart and SEIU, AT&T and the Communications Workers of America, and Democratic operative John Podesta and Republican wise man Howard Baker, all together it's bound to attract attention and maybe even shake the status quo a little.

One thing it did in Olympia was shed a little light on why House Speaker Frank Chopp was so adamant last year about stopping the so-called Wal-Mart bill that would have required large companies to spend a certain percentage of payroll on health care. The way it was drafted, it likely would have applied only to Wal-Mart.

At the time, Chopp was said to be protecting Democrats from appearing anti-business, and responding to the fact that the bill didn't have the votes to pass and even it if did, it wouldn't reduce the number of uninsured people in the state.

Chopp's chokehold on the bill angered union leaders.

Robby Stern, lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council, called Chopp's stated reasons for stopping the bill "nonsensical" and speculated that the real reason was some sort of backroom deal with business.

"His arguments never hung together," Stern said. "Some commitment was made that we don't know about."

I asked Chopp yesterday if last year if he had any inkling that the SEIU — which he is close to — was going to team up with Wal-Mart on health care. He said he didn't.

"I just didn't feel the Wal-Mart bill simply did anything, thought it was not worth it to me to pass a message bill, particularly when the message was really confused and ineffective."

Instead, Chopp agrees with what SEIU and Wal-Mart seemed to be saying yesterday: The employer-based health-care system doesn't work and needs to be dismantled, rather than tweaked with more employer mandates.

I think Frank Bruno, of "and the professor," explained this well when he said Stern of the SEIU "was working toward a health-care plan that would de-emphasize the role of employers, rather than try to extract more benefits from them."

Here's what Stern said:

It is time to admit that the employer-based health -are system is dead, a relic of the industrial economy. America cannot compete in the new global economy when we are the only industrialized nation on earth that puts the price of health care on the cost of our products.

That's Chopp's approach. And he'll meet with Stern next week to talk about it.

"That's part of the reason I said no to the Wal-Mart bill because, in fact, we had the same people come to me and say, 'Frank, we need a non-employer-based system,' and then said, 'By the way, make this an employer-based requirement.' It didn't seem to add up.

"We think by simplifying the system and making it more rationale, we'll actually end up saving money."

Here's Wal-Mart's press release on the alliance with the unions.
Stern posted a statement on Huffington Post and TPM Cafe.

Stern begins with this:

Some people were surprised to learn today that I participated in a news conference with the CEOs of several major corporations — including Wal-Mart, with whom our union has major differences.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union President Joseph Hansen issued a statement saying:

We do need to reform and restructure the current employer-based health system to achieve universal coverage, but until we have such reform, Wal-Mart needs to take responsibility for providing affordable health care to employees.

Also at TPM Cafe, Nathan Newman pays his respects to Stern, but disagrees with the SEIU chief's approach.

What does make the U.S. unique is not that employers play a large role in funding health care, but that we allow so many employers NOT to contribute to help pay for our health-care system.

That General Motors pays to fund health care out of its revenues is not unique; so does Toyota in Japan. What is unique is that most big retailers in Europe have mandatory requirements to help fund health care for their employees, while Wal-Mart faced no such requirements in the United States.

This inconsistent system does mean that Wal-Mart and other bad employers dump health-care costs on the rest of the system, which inevitably does drive up costs for General Motors, but the problem then is not the employer role in health care, but the free-riding by the Wal-Marts of the world.

If you haven't had enough, The Writing on the Wal has a roundup of what others are saying.