Asian Workers Trafficked to Build U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

[RedEarth]

Things began looking more sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R’n’R in Kuwait city.

Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai -- not to Baghdad.

"I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane," says the 48-year-old Floridian who was working as a general construction foreman on the embassy project. Seven months after signing on with First Kuwaiti in November 2005, he quit.

In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers physically assaulted and beat the construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security. And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone -- right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.

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.


http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43444/

[MacDo]

1. Sad as it may be

those workers think it's worth it. All of the Arab nations have TCN (Third Country Nationals) doing most of their labor. They won't do it, and the TCN's get paid better than they would in their own country. It's not any different than the illegal immigrants we have in the U.S, doing labor that the average citizen wouldn't do.

[Rageneau]

2. First thing Dems should demand is that Iraqi jobs go to Iraqis...

And at a premium wage.

The fact that KBR and Halliburton are importing and exploiting foreign laborers proves that their goal is profit, not patriotism.