This organization needs to be investigated by the DOL.
Pros
You'll make a lot of friends through trauma-bonding. Less of a "pro" and more of a razor-thin silver lining to a deeply traumatizing experience shared by tens of thousands of people each year because they only keep about 10% of their staff for more than three weeks. Employment is a revolving door in this place.
Cons
They regularly commit labor law violations. They lie about what employees will be paid and what hours they will work. They make it sound like a compelling job and then you end up living in literal poverty. I was told I'd be making at least 1,200 per week. My first paycheck was less than $200. They insisted it would get better but it didn't. This is an evil employer. Do not work here. I literally saw supervisors rewrite time sheets after everybody left for the night to make it look like they worked fewer hours than they did. They actively discourage new people from asking questions, hoping to entrap them. They literally say "All your questions will be answered in time" when someone starts to ask normal questions like "When are breaks," "What are my hours," "How will I be paid," "Where are we going in this van," "When will my shift end," "Why is my paycheck a fraction of what you promised," "How do you calculate wages," etc. Don't even get me started on the pay structure; they go out of their way to make it an extremely complicated formula only certain doctoral mathematicians could comprehend. The majority of CWA staff do not understand it and cannot explain it. Many, many employees have to turn to sex work in order to survive. They can't even get service jobs because they can't work regular retail hours. By the time they realize all of their paychecks for 40 hours of work are going to come out to ~$200, they're trapped. The supervisors are also young and inexperienced. There was one worker in our office who was awful to women (especially Black women). There were dozens of complaints filed against him but he wasn't fired until we went over our supervisor’s head to someone in another department because the perpetrator had started behaving violently (stalking, threats, harassment) towards a female coworker and we knew nothing would be done if we submitted another complaint to our supervisor since we'd done it so many times. They want to be cool, chill, friendly bosses. But it's not acceptable. Supervisors should be grownups who know how to discipline and terminate employees who abuse and threaten to attack their coworkers. That same supervisor went on to have an affair with a direct report for upwards of a year. This organization preaches inclusion and acceptance and human rights and progressive ideals but behind closed doors, it's one of the cruelest, most toxic institutions in America. Staff are told they're organizing communities, but they're not. They're just begging for donations that fund the salaries of a handful of people at the top who contribute basically nothing. The mission was once great, but it has devolved into a nationwide scam. And nobody suffers more from this scam than Clean Water Action employees. There is no HR. There is no oversight. There is no accountability. Every aspect of this organization is messed up. Don't work here.
