NIPSCO: Gouging Electric Bills…and Busting Unions
Jason Thiel
Indiana utility prices are skyrocketing, and the for-profit companies who control Indiana’s utilities — like NIPSCO and Duke Energy — are richer than ever. The CEO of Duke Energy was the 4th highest paid utility company CEO in 2024, raking in $21 million in total compensation. CenterPoint, an electric and natural gas company which dominates southwestern Indiana, doubled their CEO’s pay in 2025 to $24 million. It would take the median Evansville family about 461 years to earn that much money.
While CEOs enjoy record-setting pay raises and bonuses, working-class Hoosiers are facing massive increases in utility costs. In 2025, every major utility company hiked their rates, many of them with record increases of 20-27%. NIPSCO, which supplies northwest Indiana’s energy, hiked residential utility bills from $184 to $233 per month for 1000 kWh of power. All the while the Indiana minimum wage remains at the poverty wage of $7.25.
Are they hiking rates so they can pay their workers more? Of course not. In fact, NIPSCO has locked 1600 union workers out of work over daring to demand a pay increase above the inflation rate and to eliminate mandatory 16 hour shifts. The current contract offer from NIPSCO includes a 4% pay increase per year for the next 3 years. That 4% increase won’t even keep up with the rate of rent increases. Rents have increased on average 5% every year for the last decade in Indiana.
NIPSCO workers are organized with the United Steelworkers union. NIPSCO is bringing in temp workers from out of state alongside non-union workers, to protect their profits and pressure the union into accepting this rotten contract.
United Steelworkers members have also been locked out at the nearby BP Oil Whiting refinery. Both of these lockouts are in an area of Indiana represented in Congress by Democrat Frank Mrvan.
Mrvan sent a performative public letter to the BP CEO urging him to end the Whiting refinery lockout, and he showed up for a photo op with NIPSCO workers. The reality is that Frank Mrvan has taken money from both BP Oil and NIPSCO. He has never represented workers. He doesn’t call for public ownership of Indiana’s utilities. In 2022, he voted to break the railroad workers’ strike.
What’s worse, the United Steelworkers leadership has also donated money to Frank Mrvan. The leadership of every major union in the US takes millions of dollars from workers and forks it over to Democrats like Frank Mrvan, who always sell workers out.
Union leaders make cozy six-figure salaries on their members’ dues and build a career out of trying to keep peace between bosses and workers. But the bosses are constantly at war against working people, and the union leadership is preventing workers from waging war back.
NIPSCO and BP aren’t afraid of Frank Mrvan or the Democratic Party. What would scare them is if workers locked out at both of these companies, as well as workers from other unions like UAW and IBEW who have joined in solidarity on the picket line, launched a campaign to cut utility bills by 50 percent and take these companies into public ownership.
What will be even more frightening to them is for that movement to link up with the fight to build the Socialist Party of Indiana and break the labor movement away from both parties of the bosses.