New Water Department Director to Speak at Worksites Today

Mercado Needs to Listen to the Rank & File Workers!

 

On Wednesday August 21, the new Director of DWSD, Victor Mercado, is speaking at CSF (8 AM) -- at the Water Board Building (5^th Floor) (9:30 AM) -- and at the Waste Water Treatment Plant in the Parking Lot (11 AM). He will meet with the union presidents at 3 PM.

 

The new Director is coming into a highly charged atmosphere carrying a lot of baggage. DWSD workers are with privatization and contracting-out. Mercado’s former employer is a major global corporation specializing in privatization of water systems. According to the newspapers he’s never supervised more than 55 employees, yet he’s being paid $230,000 this year and $240,000 next year. That’s $90,000 more than the last permanent Director, Stephen Gorden.

 

DWSD workers have been seeing more and more of our jobs contracted out, or outright privatized. Our union officials have been negotiating with two different administrations for 16 months and no really contentious issues are even close to being resolved. The Kilpatrick administration is now using the contract negotiations to attack our healthcare, and insult us with pay freezes and pitiful proposed wages increases.

 

Mercado is reportedly going to demand a 10% cut in the DWSD budget, on top of the 5% cuts implemented at the end of the Archer administration. Yet more and more money is being shoveled into the contractors’ bank accounts every day.

 

Now we hear Mercado and Kilpatrick are cooking up a major privatization for DWSD.

 

But if Mercado hopes to really improve the DWSD he’ll have to stop listening to management. They will tell him anything to cover their tracks, and their behinds.

 

He should listen to the workers who know what’s really going on -- how the contractors are wasting the Department’s money – how management under-staffs the Department – how we are given inferior equipment to the contractors, or the contractors given the new city equipment – how under-trained our new workers are, etc.

 

Management can’t expect to keep paying the low wages it pays and still get the job done. Now management is talking about stripping our health insurance, which is why a lot of people put up with the low wages.

 

Mercado is reportedly looking to talk at us, not with us. We urge workers to insist on their right to be heard. Turning a deaf ear to our knowledge, criticisms and needs will mean big trouble real soon.