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Missouri American Water Company: as bad as Ameren?

Protest redux is one of the weapons that union workers for Missouri American Water Company (MAWC) have for keeping the heat on. Monday afternoon they were out there, again, protesting in hundred degree heat–after working in the heat all day–about having to work under an unfair contract.

MAWC is part of a nationwide privately owned utility company. The national entity just raised employee health care premiums by 52 percent. As in 52 friggin’ percent–all while raising out of pocket costs and cutting coverage. “Cutting coverage” is four innocuous sounding syllables, but that term has a human cost and Kim Duffie (pictured below) is the face of it at MAWC. Duffie has Crohn’s disease.  He’s out working in the field all the time, in Monday’s heat, for example before he came to the rally. That’s tough when you’re sick, and he feels worse these days than he used to. Under the former health care contract, he got monthly infusions to keep the Crohn’s under control–infusions that cost $7,000. No more. If he wants those now, he has to cough up 700 bucks a month and more than a hundred for other meds. He’s just a working stiff. Who’s sick a lot these days.

Like many profitable privately owned utilities, MAWC routinely cuts corners–and then asks for rate hikes. Which brings us to another weapon local 335 plans to use. Workers will show up at the rate hike hearings to describe the carelessness of their employer. Ted Carso (pictured at left) tells me that there are many large valves in the system that have been broken for years. They’re not even on the “maintenance pending” list anymore. That means that when there’s a water main break near one of them, a larger area has to be shut down while repairs proceed.

It wasn’t always like that. Al Rogers (pictured bottom left) says that two years running their local outperformed every other local in the country. In 2000 and again in 2001, they did such an outstanding job that every worker received a $700 bonus, and they took enormous pride in their jobs. That was back before the company went public and the shareholders demanded a different set of values. Now large valves that break are often abandoned and boil orders are more common.

To review then, MAWC behaves the way Ameren used to about tree trimming, inconveniences its customers unnecessarily, and … wants a rate hike of almost fifteen percent. Maybe they could make a case for that if they kept the system in good repair and didn’t pay their execs princely sums. But here’s how you know they do: when their CEO resigned last August, they agreed to pay him $1.2 million not to work for the next two years. Tom Schneider, president of Local 335, reports that when one of the national company’s subsidiaries got a rate hike recently in Virginia, the agency that granted the hike even specified that none of the money could go for bonuses for executives.

So it’s not like American Water Company is some widely respected corporation and the workers are asking for the moon. Oh no. This contract stinks, and these workers need to double the pressure on their greedy employer.  Or triple it. The only way to do that, though, is for progressives to unite and organize. Some of that already goes on, of course.  Schneider says they’ve already had support at rallies from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Communication Workers of America, SEIU, and AFL-CIO.  “Once this is over here, however it pans out, when they call on us, we gotta be there for them.”

We on the left are starting to get that. They got the money, we got the numbers, and we must start using our numbers effectively. Think Wisconsin. What we actually need is a statewide alliance. If you didn’t already read it, see the inspiring account of how Pro-Vote and Jobs with Justice coordinated a statewide labor pushback last spring that stopped dead every single anti-labor bill the Republicans threw at us–did it with little money and despite the House being 2/3 Republican! Pro-Vote, JwJ, and their labor allies are maintaining the ties they formed then and preparing for the future. Here in St. Louis, Missouri Progressive Action Group is calling a conference of progressive leaders in the metro area, including unions, to discuss how we can have each other’s back and work together next year to defeat Republicans. I believe that in Missouri progressives are getting our alliance feet under us and starting to walk. We might have to run to catch up, but we don’t have a choice. It has to happen.

As for Local 335, the answer is as simple and as difficult as getting these alliances up and running. A well run coordinated campaign could make Missouri American Water Company buckle.

Union workers at Missouri American Water Company are holding out against the contract the company is trying to force on them. Actually, “contract” is too generous a description of it. It’s more like a caricature of a contract. A burlesque. A sick parody that offers a two percent raise, coupled with a 50 percent rise in health care premiums and deep cuts in services. Oh and by the way, there’s a clause in there that destroys the union, granting the company the right to outsource whichever jobs it jolly well decides to.

The workers have demonstrated in front of the company headquarters and most Saturdays they show up in front of the home of one or another of the company executives for informational pickets. A week ago Saturday, I visited with a dozen or so brave, persistent souls who were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Webster Groves home of the company’s Human Resources Manager, Ann Simmons. One of the workers, Jim Wheaton, told me that a man had passed them a few minutes before I arrived and had said that he sympathized with their need to fight back but that they were out of line to picket particular execs at home. Blink. How dare they embarrass a woman who has sat in contract negotiations and supported taking their union away from them? How loutish, how uncivil, how unrefined of the workers to publicly scold Ms. Simmons. After Wheaton remembered to close his mouth, he asked the passerby if the man had a better solution. “Well no.”

Jim and Cheryl Wheaton

I do. I have a better solution. These twelve brave souls need to show up at Ms. Simmons’ home next Saturday with an additional 200 people. Or better yet, 500. They need to make sure that the media know they’ll have hundreds of workers  blocking the sidewalk all up and down both sides of that quiet little neighborhood. Every week. They need media attention. Now, while Americans are pissed off at the attacks on worker rights, NOW is the time to make a very public spectacle of what Missouri American Water is trying to pull.

“Oh really,” those twelve dogged picketers say. And how do you propose we conjure up those other 500 bodies? We’ve misplaced our wands.

No wands required. It’s as simple–and as daunting–as forming a metro wide alliance of progressive groups–not just Missouri American Water workers, but NEA and AFT teachers, UAW guys and Teamsters, plus all those people who belong to liberal entities like Jobs with Justice, Pro-Vote, Alliance for Retired Americans, Coalition for the Environment, Sierra Club, Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice, Young Democrats and Show Me No Hate. It’s the “You get my back and I’ll get yours” philosophy. And I can even tell you who is proposing to act on that idea. Missouri Progressive Action Group (MOPAG) is touching bases with all the stakeholders I just named and many more and inviting them to a conference where such an alliance might be formed.

Let me offer an example of what such an alliance could achieve. Last month, when I was in Cheyenne for a couple of weeks, I needed a haircut. I was explaining to the hairdresser, a gay man named Joe Corrigan, what MOPAG is about and he told me that Wyoming, a very red state, has a statewide progressive alliance. He said it was so effective that it managed to stop every one of the anti-gay bills introduced in the legislature. When one of the bills was being discussed in committee, Corrigan told me, a burly construction worker got up and told the committee members that the bill under consideration was immoral. “It’s wrong and unamerican to target people just because they’re gay,” he said. Joe said that testimony was so much more effective than if a gay hairdresser had spoken. I asked why the guy had done it. “Why? he said in disbelief. “Because. He’s union. He’s in the alliance!”

Missouri progressives already do a lot of good coordinating, of course. Unions working with progressive groups managed to stop dead every one of the anti-worker bills in the last legislative session. Pro-Vote has had an alliance for years, and now they have a new executive director, Matt Patterson, who is working to breathe more life into it. But a more encompassing vision might accomplish even more. It might, for example turn a couple of hundred people out in front of Ann Simmons’ home in Websters Groves on a regular basis. It might instill the fear in badly behaved St. Louis corporations of facing a unified front from working people.

An alliance like that could target one or several Republican held seats and put a lot of boots on the ground to shove out of power a few those legislators who hate public schools, poor people, puppies and pensions for working people. A professional researcher and pollster, a lifelong Democrat, has offered MOPAG her services free to help us design and do a poll in whichever area we choose to target.

MOPAG’s next meeting is this Saturday at the St.Louis County Headquarters On Lindbergh at 12:30 p.m. If you’re a St. Louisan who wants to take action instead of kvetching about the sorry state of affairs, be there. Or call Rea (314-727-7374) and ask to be added to the MOPAG listserv. But if you join, do it knowing that sometime soon you’ll be asked to do something.  

Tom Schneider, president of local 335 at Missouri American Water, says his dad worked for the water company for more than forty years. “Used to be that at contract time,” he told me, “workers would wonder what they were going to get that year. Now they wonder what the company is going to take away.”

Lots.

And that, in short, is the story of unions all over this country right now.

Missouri American Water Co. is part of a nationwide privately owned utility. The national entity, every time a contract is up for renewal, follows this pattern: demands unreasonable concessions, refuses to budge during negotiations, eventually declares an impasse, and as a result imposes whatever contract it jolly well wants to. In November, MAWC declared an impasse and imposed a contract that hikes employee health premiums by 52%. As in 52 friggin’ percent–all while raising out of pocket costs and cutting coverage. Oh, and one more little thing: they’re demanding the right to outsource whatever jobs they’re not in the mood to pay union wages for.

Other than that, it’s a very nice contract.

Geewhillikers, you say, those poor bosses at American Water. The company must be in dire straits if it is forced to come down so hard on workers. Yeah, it’s true. They only made 35% more profit in the third quarter of last year than in the previous year. Kinda puny, don’t you think? At least, though, they did manage to eke out a princely package for the top execs. In fact, when their CEO resigned last August, they agreed to pay him $1.2 million not to work for the next two years.

That generous spirit as regards their top employees has, unfortunately, made it necessary for the company to request huge rate hikes all over the country. The requested hikes range from 14% to 200%. MAWC got a 15% rate hike in St. Louis County in 2010. California is being pressured for 28%; Kentucky for 37%; and so it goes.

Sadly, MAWC is finding that local 335 casts a jaundiced eye on the company’s predatory behavior and is fighting back. In near 100 degree heat late Tuesday afternoon, after their work shifts ended, somewhere between 75 and 100 people gathered outside the headquarters on Craig Road in St. Louis County carrying signs and chanting.

Twenty foot rat holds a sign: MANAGEMENT is unfair to its employees. WILL THEY BE FAIR TO YOU?

Now, even if the turnout was 100 rather than 75, would you think that protest would get the union very far against a national utility company? If that’s all there was to it, the honchos could sit in their air conditioned offices chuckling smugly. But the word is that they are less than smug. For one thing, demonstrations like this one occurred all over the nation on Tuesday. More important, such demonstrations have been happening in St. Louis for months. Every weekend, a different exec gets his McMansion picketed. And at least once a week, workers get off their shifts at the water plant and pick up a protest sign.

Much as you may sympathize with workers under attack by the bosses, be aware that you, too, are under attack, as a union circular explains:

Missouri American water has unilaterally reneged on a jobs commitment made to the Union to get is support of a rate increase sought by the company before the Public Service Commission. They came to the Union in 2002 to back their efforts to get a rate increase, which we did and it passed. For our support, they agreed in writing that all future  construction work funded by a surcharge rate approval would be the Union’s work. Now, MAWC has decided to back out of this agreement because it wants to subcontract out this work. … Asking for a “surcharge” for construction allows the company to avoid lengthy review by the PSC and shortcuts the PSC’s normal approval process. The company is currently asking for another surcharge increase that could raise consumer water rates.

Clap a hand over your back pocket. Corporate utilities, yecch! And to think that Republicans badmouth the job government does. Give me a public utility. Please.