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· Corporate Accountability Reporting · Wrobbel v. Atkore Inc. et al. · Case No. 24-8012
Class Action Alert
How 12 PVC Pipe Giants Secretly Fixed Prices and Robbed Millions of Americans
Since January 2021, a cartel controlling 61% of the U.S. PVC pipe market coordinated price hikes of up to 250% through a paid industry newsletter, while consumers, municipalities, and contractors had no choice but to pay.
● Critical Severity
TL;DR
Twelve of America’s largest PVC pipe manufacturers, together controlling 61% of the U.S. market, secretly colluded through a weekly industry price report to inflate the cost of PVC pipe by up to 250% starting in January 2021. These companies, including Atkore, Westlake, and JM Eagle, used the OPIS PetroChem Wire report as a back-channel to coordinate price hikes, discipline any company that considered lowering prices, and lock in record profits, all while municipalities, contractors, farmers, and families paid artificially inflated prices for the pipe used in water systems, sewers, electrical conduit, and plumbing. Even after raw material costs normalized in 2023, pipe prices remained nearly five times higher than pre-pandemic levels. This is not a market failure; it is corporate theft, executed in plain sight through a supposedly neutral industry publication.
Demand accountability. Share this story. If you purchased PVC pipe since January 2021, you may be a class member entitled to damages.
$25B+
Estimated U.S. PVC pipe market size in 2024
61%
Market share controlled by the 12 cartel defendants
250%
PVC pipe price increase, Jan. 2021 to mid-2022
4.7x
Current PVC water pipe price vs. pre-pandemic levels
61%
Otter Tail’s PVC pipe profit margin in 2023, up from 14% average
37
U.S. states and D.C. covered by state antitrust claims
Core Allegations
Core Allegations: The Price-Fixing Cartel
What they did and how they did it · 8 points
▼
| 01 | Since at least January 1, 2021, twelve of the largest PVC pipe manufacturers in the United States, collectively controlling 61% of the market, entered into an illegal agreement to fix, raise, and stabilize prices for both PVC Water Pipe and PVC Electrical Pipe across the country. | high |
| 02 | The companies used the OPIS PetroChem Wire PVC and Pipe Weekly report, a paid industry newsletter, as a coordination platform to transmit pricing signals, share confidential market data, intimidate companies considering lower prices, and enforce cartel discipline. | high |
| 03 | OPIS, now owned by News Corp and Dow Jones, is alleged to have actively participated in the conspiracy by knowingly relaying pricing coordination messages between competing manufacturers, acting as both facilitator and enforcer of the cartel agreement. | high |
| 04 | In February 2023, OPIS confirmed in its own weekly report that converter manufacturers had coordinated a “unanimous” price increase for PVC Water Pipe even though “not all converters were particularly enthusiastic about the idea” and “demand was still too low to support raising prices.” This is direct evidence of conspiracy overriding free market forces. | high |
| 05 | Major distributors, including Core and Main (the largest U.S. PVC water pipe distributor), Ferguson, and Fortiline, are named as unnamed co-conspirators who coordinated with manufacturers to keep prices elevated, together controlling approximately 25% of the finished PVC pipe distribution market. | high |
| 06 | In May 2024, OPIS reported that the Converter Defendants explicitly stated that price hikes would not succeed “unless everyone is working together to implement them,” and that the subsequent unanimous effort drove PVC Electrical Pipe prices up by $0.10 per foot in three weeks. | high |
| 07 | Atkore’s President, William Waltz, publicly stated at a February 2024 industry conference that the company has used acquisitions to buy out a dozen competitors and “roll up the industry,” directly linking corporate consolidation to increased pricing power over consumers. | med |
| 08 | The defendants’ information sharing through the OPIS report fails every element of the FTC and DOJ antitrust safety zone for competitor information exchanges: the data is not old, the sources are not anonymized, and the identified manufacturers used the report to coordinate real-time pricing, not merely share historical data. | high |
Profit Over People: Record Margins While Consumers Paid More
Revenue extracted at the public’s expense · 6 points
▼
| 01 | From January 2021 to mid-2022, PVC pipe prices surged nearly 250%, while PVC resin, the primary raw material input, rose only 50% during the same period. Manufacturers pocketed the difference rather than passing savings to customers. | high |
| 02 | By January 2023, PVC resin prices had normalized to $0.51 per pound, even dropping below pre-pandemic levels, yet PVC Water Pipe prices remained 4.7 times higher than 2020 pre-pandemic prices, providing no corresponding benefit to consumers. | high |
| 03 | Otter Tail Corporation, a defendant whose PVC pipe business now generates 70% of company profits, reported a 198% price increase on municipal water PVC pipe from 2019 to 2023, while selling 23% less volume. Its profit margins exploded from 14% (2013-2019 average) to 61% in 2023. | high |
| 04 | Atkore Inc., the largest U.S. manufacturer of PVC Electrical Pipe, reported an 86% price increase on electrical conduit while selling 9% less volume from 2019 to 2023. Its business margins expanded from 17-20% (2016-2019) to 38% in 2023. | high |
| 05 | Westlake Corporation saw PVC pipe business margins grow from 13.5% in 2019 to 22.5% in 2023, with prices increasing 74% over the same period, despite selling into the same markets with the same raw material inputs. | med |
| 06 | PVC Electrical Pipe gross margin spreads in 2024 remained more than four times the 2017-2019 average, and PVC Electrical Pipe prices as of July 2024 were still nearly three times higher than pre-COVID levels, despite resin costs having fully normalized. | high |
Community and Infrastructure Impact
Who pays when a cartel controls essential materials · 5 points
▼
| 01 | PVC pipe is used in 66% of U.S. water distribution applications and 75% of sanitary sewer systems. Artificial price inflation on this essential material directly increased costs for public utilities, water authorities, and the municipalities they serve, burdening taxpayers. | high |
| 02 | Municipal water projects represent 64% of the finished PVC pipe market. Every dollar of cartel-inflated pricing on municipal contracts translates directly into higher water bills, delayed infrastructure projects, or deferred maintenance on aging water systems. | high |
| 03 | Contractors and plumbers who agreed to fixed-price project bids with clients were trapped absorbing cartel-driven cost spikes mid-project. Neptune Plumbing in Ohio reported a 75% price increase on PVC pipe and described the volatility as unlike anything seen “in my lifetime.” | med |
| 04 | There is no viable substitute for PVC Water Pipe in the vast majority of water infrastructure applications. Its properties, including a 100-year lifespan, corrosion resistance, and reduced failure rates, make it irreplaceable, leaving purchasers with no alternative when prices are fixed. | med |
| 05 | High barriers to market entry, confirmed by Otter Tail’s CEO on an April 2023 earnings call, mean the cartel faces no meaningful competitive threat from new entrants. Even if a company entered the market, Atkore and others have a documented history of acquiring competitors to eliminate pricing pressure. | med |
Corporate Accountability Failures
Structural impunity and the pattern of cartel behavior · 5 points
▼
| 01 | The PVC pipe cartel is not an isolated incident. The European Commission fined 14 PVC resin producers for price-fixing in 1999 and fined 24 companies a combined 173.8 million euros for fixing heat stabilizers used in PVC pipe manufacturing in 2009. | high |
| 02 | Co-conspirator Fortiline was already ordered by the FTC in 2016 to cease and desist from price-fixing after inviting a competitor to fix prices for ductile iron pipe in North Carolina and Virginia. It is now named in this case as an unnamed distributor co-conspirator in an even larger scheme. | high |
| 03 | OPIS, the report publisher named as a co-conspirator, was already implicated in a 2020 California Attorney General lawsuit alleging that two energy companies used OPIS to drive up gasoline prices. That case settled for $50 million, yet OPIS continued operating as an industry pricing benchmark. | high |
| 04 | The FTC and DOJ withdrew their 1996 information-sharing safe harbor guidance in 2023, explicitly citing enforcement actions in the poultry, advertising, and telecom industries where the policy had enabled anticompetitive coordination. The PVC pipe market’s information-sharing practices are alleged to go far beyond what even the old, permissive policy would have allowed. | med |
| 05 | Trade associations including the Vinyl Institute, the Plastic Pipe and Fittings Association, and the Uni-Bell PVC Pipe Association gave competitor executives and employees regular in-person opportunities to coordinate outside of the OPIS report channel, reinforcing the cartel’s reach beyond any single communication platform. | med |
Timeline of Coordinated Price Manipulation
January 2021
The alleged conspiracy begins. OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly reports that converter manufacturers are coordinating price increases, stating that the “only requirement would be discipline.”
Jan. 2021 to Mid-2022
PVC pipe prices surge nearly 250% while PVC resin input costs rise only 50%, generating record profit margins for converter defendants.
October 2022
OPIS credits distributors as “partners in the determination not to let prices slip” despite steep drops in pipe demand, confirming coordinated price maintenance between manufacturers and distributors.
November 2022
OPIS reports that converter defendants verified price floor adherence by phone, catching buyers who falsely claimed competitors offered lower prices. “So far, nobody has blinked.”
January 2023
January 2023
PVC resin prices normalize to $0.51/lb, well below pandemic highs. Converter defendants coordinate a February price increase letter anyway. PVC pipe prices remain artificially elevated.
February 2023
OPIS confirms the price increase “had been unanimous,” even though demand was “still too low to support raising prices.” The market is not moving on fundamentals; it is moving on cartel agreement.
May 2023
OPIS directs market-leading Atkore to “take a hard stand” on inflated PVC Electrical Pipe prices, with other converters signaling they will follow Atkore’s lead.
February 2024
February 2024
Atkore President William Waltz admits on an earnings call that Atkore is trying to push pipe prices up and acknowledges it is challenging without demand support, but says the company remains “optimistic” and “always aspires to increase our pricing.”
March 2024
Eight converter defendants, including Westlake, National, Jet Stream, IPEX, Atkore, Diamond, Sanderson, and JM Eagle, issue a coordinated price increase letter for PVC Water Pipe. Otter Tail subsidiaries confirm they will match the increase without issuing their own letters.
May 2024
Converter defendants confirm that price hikes “won’t work unless everyone is working together.” The unanimous effort drives PVC Electrical Pipe prices up $0.10/ft in three weeks.
June – July 2024
OPIS confirms converters are planning sequential 5-block price increases, using tactics they “have been successful with in the past,” with coordinated implementation dates. Six manufacturers issue identical price sheets nationwide for PVC Electrical Pipe.
September 3, 2024
Plaintiff Blake Wrobbel, a Tennessee farmer who purchased PVC Water Pipe at inflated prices, files the federal class action complaint in the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of all U.S. purchasers.
Direct Quotes from the Legal Record
QUOTE 1
The cartel’s own playbook, stated openly
Core Allegations
“While some market participants believed that the market needed to be reset with a new price letter close to the current price level, others said there is no reason converters can’t push prices higher without a new price letter. The only requirement would be discipline.”
💡 OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly, January 22, 2021. This is the cartel’s mission statement: prices need not follow costs or demand. They require only that competitors agree not to compete. “Discipline” is cartel language for maintaining an illegal price-fixing agreement.
QUOTE 2
Cartel enforcement through the OPIS report
Core Allegations
“Converters reported that recently there had been some cases of buyers fishing for a lower price by claiming that a competitor had sold to them at a lower number, but a phone call or two proved that this was not the case. So far, nobody has blinked.”
💡 OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly, November 4, 2022. Manufacturers are actively monitoring each other’s compliance, calling each other to verify no one has defected from the price floor. This is cartel policing in practice, not normal business activity.
QUOTE 3
Distributors recruited as co-conspirators
Profit Over People
“Converters spoke about working in concert with large distributors for months to keep pricing from sliding below Block 440 to prevent devaluing distributors’ inventories.”
💡 OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly, February 24, 2023. Manufacturers and distributors together maintained a price floor, explicitly protecting each other’s profit margins. Every buyer in America paid the cost of this agreement.
QUOTE 4
Unanimous price hike regardless of market conditions
Core Allegations
“The increase announcements had been unanimous, even though not all converters were particularly enthusiastic about the idea, as demand was still too low to support raising prices.”
💡 OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly, February 10, 2023. This is an admission that prices were raised in the face of weak demand because of a collective agreement, not because costs or market conditions justified it. A competitive market would have produced the opposite result.
QUOTE 5
Atkore’s president admits to coordinated price-pushing
Profit Over People
“[Atkore is] still optimistic going forward on these attempt[s] to push the prices in the industry up, noting that Atkore ‘always aspire[s] to increase our pricing.'”
💡 Atkore President William Waltz, February 1, 2024 earnings call. A company president publicly describes ongoing efforts to push prices up across the entire industry, not just for Atkore’s own products. This language describes coordinated market manipulation, not competitive pricing strategy.
QUOTE 6
Consolidation as a tool for pricing power
Corporate Accountability Failures
“In 2013, there was at least a dozen PVC pipe competitors, but since that time, Atkore ‘bought those companies up and rolled up the industry or our other competitors.'”
💡 Atkore President William Waltz, Citi Global Industrial Tech and Mobility Conference, February 2024. Atkore openly credits industry consolidation through acquisitions as the mechanism for increased pricing power. Fewer competitors means less resistance to cartel discipline.
QUOTE 7
Unanimous action required for price increases to hold
Core Allegations
“Converters said the price hikes won’t work unless everyone is working together to implement them.”
💡 OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly, May 3, 2024. This statement is a direct admission that the price increases require coordination across competitors. This is the textbook definition of a price-fixing cartel, stated in an industry newsletter with a paid subscriber list.
QUOTE 8
Inelastic demand weaponized against consumers
Community and Infrastructure Impact
“Prices have continued to stay up and stay stronger because the cost of the pipe isn’t a significant component of the overall projects and customers need the pipe to do the projects.”
💡 Otter Tail President and CEO Charles McFarlane, August 2023 earnings call. This is an executive candidly explaining how the cartel exploits captive demand. Customers cannot walk away from a sewer project because pipe prices spiked. That captivity is being used to extract maximum profit.
QUOTE 9
Repeat the tactic until it stops working
Core Allegations
“The consensus this week was for a single price increase that would take prices up by about 5% over the current market level, with another percentage added to account for the discount. Then, if that works do it again and again until it stops working. Conduit converters have been successful with this strategy in the past.”
💡 OPIS PVC and Pipe Weekly, June 21, 2024. More than three years into the alleged conspiracy, manufacturers are still openly coordinating through the same channel, using an established playbook. There is no ambiguity about intent.
QUOTE 10
Real-world harm on the ground
Community and Infrastructure Impact
“PVC pipe has gone up about 75% and there’s been a lot of volatility, a lot of market confusion going on, a lot of triggers of areas that we have never seen occur in my lifetime before.”
💡 Mike Wallenstein, Co-President of Neptune Plumbing in Ohio, September 2022. While executives celebrated record margins, small business owners and their customers paid the price. This is not economic theory; it is money taken from people who build and repair the infrastructure Americans depend on.
Commentary
What exactly did these companies do that is illegal?
▼
Price-fixing is illegal under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act regardless of whether companies meet in a back room or communicate through a shared newsletter. These manufacturers used a weekly industry report to tell each other when to raise prices, how much to raise them, and how to punish any company that considered lowering them. That coordination, however it happens, is a criminal conspiracy when competitors agree to override the forces of supply and demand. These companies had more market power, more resources, and more access to legal counsel than anyone. They knew exactly what they were doing.
How is OPIS, a news and data service, implicated in this conspiracy?
▼
OPIS is not accused of simply reporting prices. It is accused of being the active communication channel through which competitors coordinated pricing strategies, transmitted offers to collude, reassured conspirators about each other’s compliance, and intimidated anyone who considered breaking ranks. When a news service knowingly relays messages between competitors that say things like “nobody has blinked” and that price hikes “won’t work unless everyone is working together,” it has stepped out of the role of neutral reporting and into the role of cartel infrastructure. OPIS previously settled with California for $50 million in a separate case involving gasoline price manipulation through its platform.
Did the pandemic cause these price increases?
▼
No. The complaint makes clear that the pandemic provides no cover for what happened here. PVC resin prices, the primary cost input, rose 50% during the pandemic and then normalized completely by early 2023, returning to $0.51 per pound. Yet PVC Water Pipe prices remained 4.7 times higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2024. In a competitive market, normalized input costs produce normalized output prices. These prices did not normalize because the companies agreed not to let them. They used pandemic disruption as an opening to spike prices and then used cartel coordination to keep them elevated long after the disruption ended.
Who actually paid for this scheme? Who are the real victims?
▼
The victims are everyone who bought PVC pipe in the United States since January 2021. That includes homeowners doing plumbing repairs, farmers irrigating their land, small plumbing contractors who absorbed price spikes on fixed-bid jobs, and most significantly, cities and water authorities that paid inflated prices on water and sewer infrastructure projects. When municipalities overpay for pipe, the cost passes to ratepayers through higher water bills, deferred repairs, or delayed infrastructure investment. The people harmed most are those least able to absorb surprise cost increases, including small businesses, working families, and communities with aging water systems already stretched thin.
How serious is this lawsuit? Is it credible?
▼
This is a federal class action filed in the Northern District of Illinois by Scott and Scott Attorneys at Law, a firm with substantial experience in antitrust class actions. The complaint is not based on circumstantial inference or economic modeling alone. It cites verbatim quotes from the OPIS weekly reports, earnings call statements from company executives, SEC filings, and documented patterns of simultaneous price moves that defy competitive market explanations. The complaint covers violations under federal law and the antitrust statutes of 35 states and the District of Columbia. The pattern of conduct alleged, with the same coordination mechanisms, the same results, and the same players repeating behavior across years, describes an unusually well-documented antitrust conspiracy.
Why did no government regulator stop this earlier?
▼
This is a critical question. The FTC and DOJ had a safe harbor policy that was permissive about certain information sharing between competitors, and the complaint argues the defendants exploited that permissiveness. In 2023, both agencies withdrew the policy, explicitly citing enforcement failures where competitors used information exchange to soften competition. But withdrawal came years after the alleged scheme began. The Fortiline co-conspirator had already been ordered by the FTC to stop price-fixing in 2016 and is named in this case for repeating the behavior. This reflects a consistent pattern where prior enforcement actions produce consent decrees rather than serious deterrence, and corporations calculate that the expected penalties are cheaper than the expected profits from continued misconduct.
Does this connect to broader patterns of corporate consolidation and market power?
▼
Directly and explicitly. Atkore’s own president acknowledged at a 2024 investor conference that the company bought up more than a dozen competitors over the past decade to “roll up the industry.” Fewer competitors means fewer potential defectors from a price-fixing agreement, lower risk of competitive price cuts, and greater shared interest in maintaining elevated prices. This is not unique to PVC pipe. Concentrated markets across construction materials, food processing, healthcare, and telecommunications show the same pattern: consolidation reduces competitive pressure, and reduced competitive pressure creates the conditions for coordinated pricing. The complaint frames this as a structural issue, not simply a case of a few bad actors.
What can I do to prevent this from happening again?
▼
First, if you purchased PVC pipe anywhere in the United States since January 1, 2021, contact the attorneys at Scott and Scott (scott-scott.com) to understand whether you qualify as a class member. Second, contact your congressional representatives and demand stronger antitrust enforcement, including criminal prosecution of individual executives, not just corporate fines that companies absorb as a cost of doing business. Third, support advocacy organizations that work on corporate accountability and antitrust reform. Fourth, share this story. Corporate price-fixing depends on low public visibility. The more people understand how these schemes work, and who pays for them, the harder it becomes for corporations to sustain them without consequence.
This Is Not Over.
The alleged cartel was still actively coordinating price increases as recently as July 2024, just weeks before this lawsuit was filed. If you purchased PVC pipe since January 2021, you may be entitled to damages. Stay informed. Demand accountability.
Case No. 1:24-cv-08012 | N.D. Illinois Eastern Division | Filed September 3, 2024
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