American Water in Hot Water!
Coast-to-Coast Actions Target Renegade Corporation

A wash in profits, executives shower themselves with bonuses and exorbitant compensation packages. Meanwhile, consumers are drowning in rate hikes and workers are forced to weather company-imposed cuts to health coverage.

As UWUA members know, this is an all-too familiar scenario in the United States today.

At American Water, workers are joining together, standing up and saying, “Enough is enough!”

The company’s unfair contract demands and bargaining tactics have provoked a firestorm of resistance by UWUA members and local unions nationwide. American Water in Hot Water!

Coast-to-Coast Actions Target Renegade Corporation
From Long Island, New York to Pensacola, Florida; across to Los Angeles and Monterey, California; and all points in between, workers are defending their local union contracts, joining together to take back what American Water wrongly took from them under the National Benefits Agreement.

It’s not just the 2,500 Utility Workers employed at American Water. Union members from eight other unions have joined in a national campaign against this company’s corporate greed. For years, American Water has been waging an unrelenting attack against UWUA members’ standard of living and working conditions. At least seven UWUA local contracts have expired, including five in Pennsylvania alone. Among other egregious proposals, management is demanding the right to eliminate every UWUA member’s job through unlimited subcontracting!

Healthcare Cuts
Meanwhile, in national benefits negotiations, American Water has unilaterally imposed healthcare cost increases: 52% rise in premiums for family health coverage, substantial cuts in overall benefits, and no retirement health benefits for new hires.

Taking unprecedented action, the UWUA has picketed, leafleted, and demonstrated at American Water worksites, executives’ homes, the company’s public “open houses,” and at rate case hearings in at least nine states – sometimes all on the same day. Other unions representing American Water employees are also taking part in the national effort to make American Water a responsible corporate citizen. The campaign is not limited to American Water locals. Other UWUA locals have jumped into the fray, including New York Local 1- 2, Philadelphia Local 686, New Jersey Local 601 and California Local 132.

Rate Increases
In addition, the UWUA has reached out to consumer groups to make common cause against the insatiable greed of American Water management. While the corporation boasts record profits at ratepayer expense and doles out huge bonuses and lucrative compensation packages to top bosses, American Water is demanding huge rate increases – in some cases 35% and more – from working families already struggling with the worst economic recession in decades.

At the request of UWUA National President Mike Langford, who also serves as a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, the AFL-CIO has pledged its full support for the Campaign for Justice at American Water and is lining up solidarity actions across the nation.

The UWUA’s increasing scrutiny of every aspect of American Water’s business reveals a renegade corporation that must be held accountable for its unseemly actions – whether in the realm of environmental violations, the unfair gouging of consumers, or unjustified takeaways in employee benefits.

For many UWUA members at American Water, this is the first time they have participated in sustained acts of solidarity, made necessary by unbridled corporate arrogance. These union workers are receiving a different sort of “on the job” training from American Water – one that both workers and top managers will likely remember for a long time to come.

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