Cheap labor flows to Iraq, KBR uses illegals

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Using Asia's Poor to Build US Bases in Iraq

By David Phinney CorpWatch
Saturday 15 October 2005


Companies like Halliburton are importing 'third country nationals' - and putting them to work in horrible conditions - to fulfill their U.S. government contracts.

Jing Soliman left his family in the Philippines for what sounded like a sure thing - a job as a warehouse worker at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. His new employer, Prime Projects International (PPI) of Dubai, is a major, but low-profile, subcontractor to Halliburton's multi-billion-dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide support services to U.S. forces.

But Soliman wouldn't be making anything near the salaries - starting $80,000 a year and often topping $100,000 - that Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other laborers it recruits from the United States. Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated $615 a month - including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that would be just over $3 an hour.
But for the 12-hour day, seven-day week that Soliman says was standard for him and many contractor employees in Iraq, he actually earned $1.56 an hour

Soliman planned to send most of his $7,380 annual pay home to his family in the Philippines, where the combined unemployment and underemployment rate tops 28 percent. The average annual income in Manila is $4,384, and the World Bank estimates that nearly half of the nation's 84 million people live on less than $2 a day.

"I am an ordinary man," said Soliman during a recent telephone interview from his home in Quezon City near Manila. "It was good money."

His ambitions, like many U.S. civilians working in Iraq, were modest: "I wanted to save up, buy a house and provide for my family," he says. >>>cont

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