Union Fails due to character sets

[jed davidow]

I am performing a union of querries. One pulls a varchar field, the other pulls a constant:

SELECT
A,
B,
'SHIPPED' as Status
FROM TABLE_A

UNION

SELECT
A,
B,
C as Status
FROM TABLE_B


I get the following error:

Illegal mix of collations (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)
and (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation 'UNION'

How do I deal with this?
Thanks!