Pentagon Finds Worker Abuse and Trafficking in Iraq, but Penalizes No One

A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad:

Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World's Largest Embassy

by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatchOctober 17th, 2006 John Owen didn’t realize how different his job would be from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.Then seven months into the job, he quit. Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.” In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers beat their construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security. Pentagon Finds Worker Abuse and Trafficking in Iraq, but Penalizes No One On April 4, 2006, the Pentagon issued a new contracting directive following a secret investigation that officially confirms what many South Asian laborers have been complaining about ever since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some contractors, many working as subcontractors to Halliburton /KBR in Iraq, were found to be using deceptive, bait-and-switch hiring practices and charging recruiting fees that indebted low-paid migrant workers for many months or even years to their employers. Contractors were also accused of providing substandard, crowded sleeping quarters, serving poor food, and circumventing Iraqi immigration procedures. While the Pentagon declines to specifically name those contractors found to be doing business in this way, it also acknowledged in an April 19 memorandum that it was a widespread practice among contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan to take away workers passports. Holding onto employee passports -- a direct violation of US labor trafficking laws -- helped stop workers from leaving war-torn Iraq or taking better jobs with other contractors. Contractors engaging in the practice, states the memo, must immediately "cease and deist." "All passports will be returned to employees by 1 May 06. This requirement will be flowed down to each of your subcontractors performing work in this theater." The Pentagon has yet to announce of any penalty for those found to be in violation of US labor trafficking laws or contract requirements. 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 >>>>cont