The Setup: A Private Company. Public Water. Private-Sized Wages.

The Springfield Water and Sewer Commission is a public body. It handles the water and wastewater infrastructure for the people of Springfield, Massachusetts. In the late 1990s, the Commission contracted with a private company to run operations, and that company is now Veolia Water Contract Operations USA, Inc., formerly known as Suez Water Environmental Services, Inc.

When a private company takes over a public function like this, Massachusetts law has a clear answer about wages: the Prevailing Wage Act (PWA), Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 149, Sections 26 through 27H, requires that workers on public construction projects get paid the going rate for their trade. The PWA has been on the books since 1935. Its entire purpose is to prevent corporations from undercutting workers by using public contracts as cover for private-grade wages.

Four workers, Jeremiah Nicholls, Walter Goodrow, Wesley Dinsmore, and Richard Ruppert, said they did work that fell squarely within the PWA’s definition of covered labor. Veolia paid them less than the law required. They sued. And Veolia’s response was to point to a single special act passed by the Massachusetts legislature in 1997 and argue it grants them a permanent exemption from fair pay obligations.

How Veolia Rewrote the Rules With Fine Print

The 1997 Special Act (1997 Mass. Acts ch. 155) was passed to let the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission enter into flexible long-term contracts for running its wastewater infrastructure. It modified standard competitive bidding rules and carved out some regulatory requirements. Veolia’s legal argument centers on Section 6 of that Special Act, which says that most laws governing procurement and construction “shall not be applicable” to contractors like Veolia, except for certain sections.

Here is where Veolia’s gamble gets audacious. The Special Act’s Section 6 explicitly carves back in the PWA’s sections 26 through 27H as applying to contractors, but Veolia argues that carve-back only applies to a narrow category of work: “the construction and design of improvements.” Veolia says the workers’ day-to-day labor does not meet even that limited threshold. In other words, Veolia read a law that explicitly kept the Prevailing Wage Act alive, and argued it actually kills it for most of their workforce.

The district court in Massachusetts agreed with Veolia and granted summary judgment in the company’s favor. The workers appealed. The First Circuit looked at the case and concluded the legal questions were so unresolved, so consequential, and so deeply tied to Massachusetts public policy that it would not issue a ruling until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court clarifies the law itself.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Wage Theft Actually Takes From a Person

Wage theft is not a clerical error. It is not a technicality buried in labor law. When a company the size of Veolia, a global water giant managing public services that communities depend on, refuses to pay its workers the rate the law sets, it is making a deliberate decision: that shareholder margins matter more than a Springfield worker’s ability to pay rent, buy groceries, or keep the lights on.

The four workers named in this case, Jeremiah Nicholls, Walter Goodrow, Wesley Dinsmore, and Richard Ruppert, are not abstractions. They show up every day to maintain the wastewater infrastructure that protects public health for the people of Springfield. The Prevailing Wage Act exists specifically because history proved that without it, private contractors underpay the workers doing the most essential, unglamorous, physically demanding work in any city. These workers do not get to work from home. They do not have stock options. The prevailing wage is often the single most important labor protection they have access to.

Veolia’s legal strategy compounds the original underpayment with something arguably worse: years of legal limbo. These workers have been fighting through state court, then federal district court, and now the First Circuit Court of Appeals, only to be told the case must go to yet another court before anyone will rule on it. Every month this drags on is a month the gap between what they were paid and what they were owed grows larger. Legal delay, when you are the corporation, is free. When you are a worker waiting on wages, delay is a cost you pay every single week.

There is also the dignity dimension. Veolia’s primary argument is that the work these employees performed, day in and day out at a public facility serving a public purpose, does not qualify as “construction and design of improvements” under the Special Act. The company is saying, in legal terms, that the workers’ labor was ordinary enough to deserve exemption from fair-pay guarantees. It is a strategy that requires Veolia to minimize what its own workforce does in order to avoid paying them fairly for doing it. The law rewards that kind of semantic minimization. The workers live inside it.

Legal Receipts: The Exact Words That Could Decide Everything

The following are direct quotes from the court opinion. Read them carefully. These are the actual words companies and courts use to determine whether a worker gets paid fairly or gets left behind.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When Workers Lose

Economic Inequality: The Privatization Trap

The structure of this case is a textbook example of how privatization of public services creates a wage suppression mechanism. Springfield, Massachusetts gave a private corporation, Veolia, control over public water infrastructure. The corporation then used the specific legal architecture of that privatization deal to argue it owes its workers less than the law would normally require. The public loses twice: once when services get handed to a private profit-seeking entity, and again when that entity uses the hand-off agreement to depress the wages of the workforce that actually does the public work.

The Prevailing Wage Act was created in 1935 precisely because this pattern already existed almost a century ago. Governments contract out public work, private companies undercut wage standards, and workers absorb the cost of cost-cutting. The PWA forced parity. What Veolia is doing is seeking to use a 1997 local special act to undo what the 1935 statewide law established. The company is not the first to try this. It will not be the last. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s answer here will set the rules for every municipality in the state that has privatized public infrastructure since 1997.

This dynamic hits Springfield particularly hard. Springfield is one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, with a median household income well below the state average. Workers in public works trades rely on prevailing wage protections as a foundational income floor. When a corporation strips that floor, the economic consequence does not stay contained to the four named plaintiffs. It signals to every privatized-service employer in the region what is permissible.

Public Health: The People Who Keep the Water Running Deserve Fair Pay

This case involves workers at a wastewater treatment plant and sewer system. These are the people who ensure that the water Springfield residents flush away does not become a public health emergency. Wastewater treatment is not optional infrastructure. When it fails, communities face disease, environmental contamination, and regulatory crisis. The workers maintaining that system are, by any objective standard, essential workers performing public health labor.

The irony of Veolia’s legal position is sharp. The company argues that the work the plaintiffs perform is routine enough, ordinary enough, and low-stakes enough to fall outside “construction and design of improvements,” and thus outside prevailing wage protections. But those same workers are responsible for the physical integrity of systems that protect public health. Veolia cannot simultaneously claim the workers’ labor is too minor to deserve fair wages and rely on that same labor to fulfill a multi-million-dollar public infrastructure contract.

Chronic underpayment of essential infrastructure workers creates concrete public health risks. Workers in skilled trades who cannot afford to stay in the field leave. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Recruitment dries up. Maintenance deferred becomes infrastructure failure. The false economy of paying below prevailing wages at a wastewater facility is a cost the community eventually pays in degraded service, not Veolia’s shareholders.

The Corporate Math vs. The Human Math

What Now: How This Fight Gets Won

The Decision-Makers to Watch

The Regulatory Levers That Still Exist

What Everyday People Can Do Right Now

Contact your Massachusetts state representative and senator and demand they close the loophole in the 1997 Special Act before another corporation uses it. Support local labor unions in the construction and public works trades, because collective bargaining agreements are often the only wage protection that survives when statutory protections get litigated away by corporate lawyers. Demand that your city or town’s public infrastructure contracts include explicit, irrevocable prevailing wage requirements that cannot be argued away by pointing to a special act nobody remembered existed. Veolia is not unique. Every city that privatized water, transit, or sanitation services in the 1990s may have created the same trap. Find out what contracts govern your public services. The workers inside them are counting on someone to care enough to ask.