Fortunately, CorpWatch is still on the case, specifically David Phinney on the continuing saga of foreign workers lured to Baghdad to work on the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting is the lead builder on what will be the largest embassy in the world. The latest story talks to an American who quit as a foreman from "one of the worst jobs he has ever had in his 27 years of construction work."
He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day. As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.
It's pretty likely that those workers don't know that the jobs they're heading for are in Baghdad. Their boarding passes in Kuwait City say "Dubai." Phinney's story notes that "the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and growing opposition to the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped 'Not valid for Iraq'." He reports, "The Kuwait-headquartered, Lebanese-run company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003. Much of its work is performed by cheap labor largely hired from South Asia and the company has an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in the theater of war."
Back in April I had noted a Chicago Tribune report on these abuses, Pipeline to Peril, when the newspaper had its final followup to the story.
In April 2006, the military demanded reforms in how foreign labor is handled at U.S. bases in Iraq. Subcontractors were told to return any passports confiscated from workers and were warned of stern action if abuses continue.
Stern action? Phinney reports there was no action.
The Pentagon has yet to announce ... any penalty for those found to be in violation of US labor trafficking laws or contract requirements.
Yet the abuses continue. "One longtime supervisor claims that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly protest that First Kuwaiti 'treats them like animals,' and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions." Not surprising, US news outlets haven't noticed, even the few that had earlier covered the State Department and Pentagon investigations of worker abuse, exploitation and illegal trafficking. Thus far, only a German media outlet has picked up the latest chapter.
And we're not likely to hear much more.
As of now only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project's walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.
Even this tight security is a charade, says on former high-level First Kuwaiti manager. First Kuwaiti managers living at the construction site regularly smuggle prostitutes in from the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, he says....
But the exposure that the US occupation forces and First Kuwaiti may fear most could begin with the contractor itself and the conditions workers are forced to endure at this most obvious symbol of the American democracy project in Iraq.