Slave Next Door (45 page)

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all passports be returned and that such practices “cease and desist”

immediately.7

They didn’t. In July 2007, two American civilian contractors who

had worked on the embassy testified before the House Committee on

Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by California congressman

Henry A. Waxman. One of the two, native Floridian John Owens, had

worked for twenty-seven years building U.S. embassies around the

world, sometimes in areas troubled by violence and corruption. But

after working for seven months as a foreman in Iraq, he quit. “I’ve never

seen a project more fucked up. Every U.S. labor law was broken,” he

said.8 Owens testified that the workers’ living and working conditions

were “deplorable” and described how workers were “verbally and phys-

ically abused,” forced to live in cramped trailers, denied basic needs like

shoes and gloves, and made to work twelve-hour days, seven days a

week, with time off only for prayer, and how they “had their salaries

docked for petty infractions.”9

The second contractor to testify was Rory J. Mayberry. He told the

committee that First Kuwaiti managers had asked him to escort fifty-

one Filipino workers onto a flight to Baghdad. The plane, Mayberry

recalled, was an unmarked fifty-two-seater—“an antique piece of

shit.”10 Mayberry noted with surprise that “all of our tickets said we

were going to Dubai,” whereupon a First Kuwaiti manager told him

not to let any of the laborers know they were going to Iraq. John Owens

recalled the same experience when he saw the workers’ boarding

passes: “I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on

the wrong plane.”11 In Mayberry’s words, the workers were “kid-

napped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy.” After their

passports were taken in Baghdad, they were “smuggled into the Green

Zone.”12

Mayberry, an emergency medical technician, was horrified at the

number of injuries and ailments among the 2,500 or so foreign laborers.

Infected, unattended sores and unbandaged wounds were common.

There was a lack of disinfectant, hot water, any form of hygiene.

Prescription pain killers, he testified, “were being handed out like a

candy store . . . and then people were sent back to work. . . . I told First

Kuwaiti that you don’t give painkillers to people who are running

machinery and working on heavy construction, and they said, ‘That’s

how we do it.’” After he requested an investigation into the deaths of

two laborers as a result of what he believes could have been “medical

homicide,” Mayberry was fired.13

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Owens confirmed the inhumane treatment. He testified that health

and safety measures were nonexistent and that serious injuries took

place as a result. When he advised workers to seek medical help for their

injuries and illnesses, he was accused by the firm’s managers of “spoil-

ing the workers and allowing them to simply skip work.” At one point,

seventeen laborers tried to escape by climbing over the wall; they were

recaptured—with the help of a State Department official—and put in

“virtual lockdown.”14

First Kuwaiti responded in writing that the charges were “ludi-

crous.”15 State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard dis-

puted the charges in a follow-up hearing, stating that his “limited

review” and two visits to Baghdad had failed to verify the claims:

“Nothing came to our attention that caused us to believe that trafficking-

in-persons violations”—or any other serious abuses—“occurred at the

construction workers’ camp at the new embassy compound.”16 In a

written submission the antislavery organization Free the Slaves pointed

to serious flaws in Krongard’s report. They noted that the State

Department’s own Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report for 2007 revealed

“a structure conducive to trafficking in persons” throughout much of

the Middle East. This includes sponsorship laws that give employers

control over workers’ ability to leave the work site, their job, or the

country. The TIP report observed “Employers commonly do not provide

workers with documents legitimizing their employment in the coun-

try . . . and refuse to sign exit permits allowing victims to leave the coun-

try, effectively holding the worker hostage.” Most damning, the Free the

Slaves submission showed that while Krongard had gone to investigate a

charge of human trafficking, he failed

to recognize the significance of, and appropriately characterize as warn-

ing signs: . . . the contractor’s practice of holding employee passports;

terms of employment that raise concerns about exploitation, including

the amount of payment relative to national standards, payment by the

month rather than the day or hour, and a 14 day workweek, with no days

off; the requirement to prepay recruitment, travel or other fees before

obtaining control of earnings; and the fact that most workers interviewed

either originated in countries whose laws prohibit work in Iraq, because

of the strong possibility of abuse, and/or whose countries are identified by

State’s TIP report as having a significant number of victims of severe traf-

ficking to the Middle East.17

For his part, Chairman Waxman was also dissatisfied with

Krongard’s methodology and conclusions. The inspector general, said

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Waxman, “had followed highly irregular procedures in exonerating the

prime contractor, First Kuwaiti Trading Company, of charges of labor

trafficking.”18 On September 18, 2007, Waxman began an inquiry into

accusations that Krongard had repeatedly hindered fraud and abuse

investigations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The allegations were sup-

ported by information from several of Krongard’s current and former

employees, some of whom sought whistle-blower status to protect them

from punishment for malfeasance. Congressman Waxman stated to

Krongard, “One consistent element in these allegations is that you

believe your foremost mission is to support the Bush administration,

especially with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than act as an

independent and objective check on waste, fraud and abuse on behalf of

U.S. taxpayers.”19 Playing politics may be business as usual, but when

politics and business combine to abet slavery and then hide it, some-

thing is terribly wrong in our government.

I N T H E WA K E O F K AT R I N A

Any American who is not aware of the dismal federal response to

Hurricane Katrina has not been paying attention. A significant part of

our country lay in ruins, and much of it still does. In the aftermath of

the hurricane a door opened to abuse and human trafficking. The need

for immediate, cheap labor to help repair the storm’s damage—and to

rebuild order in the devastated region—was met with an influx of

thousands of laborers. Some were U.S. citizens, others foreigners—

documented and not. Some came on their own, seeking work, while

others were brought in by smugglers, with the usual promises of steady

work at a decent wage. Meanwhile, the combination of physical devas-

tation and government negligence fostered a breakdown of order, and as

human rights attorney Cathy Albisa puts it, Mississippi and Louisiana

were “like the Wild West all over again.”20 The opportunities for forced

labor were rife, and opportunist criminals wasted no time. When the rule

of law breaks down, exploitation and slavery flourish, imposing the con-

trol of the weak by the strong, the hopeful by the greedy.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between a case of trafficking

and one involving harsh labor conditions. This is especially the case

with undocumented, “illegal” workers. “The very act of criminalizing a

person’s existence,” says Albisa, “creates these blurry lines.”21 In a

number of instances, the government determined that, while uncon-

scionable, the conditions under which workers suffered were really

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nothing more than instances of unfortunate working arrangements—

some of which included labor law violations—and did not impede the

workers from leaving to find other employment. Some cases, such as the

Imperial Nurseries case in Connecticut, leave room for doubt.22 Still,

while the seeds of trafficking might exist within worker exploitation,

they don’t always blossom into full-blown slavery—at least to the extent

that they can be proven in court.

In November 2005—shortly after Katrina hit—the online magazine

Salon.com
published a report by journalist Roberto Lovato entitled

“Gulf Coast Slaves.” It documented the Halliburton company’s decep-

tive hiring, mistreatment, and discarding of hundreds of undocumented

Latino workers brought in for post-Katrina cleanup on U.S. naval bases

in Louisiana and Mississippi. KBR was the main subcontractor.23

According to Lovato, President Bush paved the way for labor abuses

by relaxing labor standards immediately after the hurricane through his

suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act, a law that requires contractors to

pay workers the “prevailing wages” for government contract work. Bush

also removed the requirement that laborers had to fill out employment

eligibility forms. Without them, Halliburton and its subcontractors

were free to hire undocumented laborers and to pay them as little as

they chose—or, as happened in some cases, nothing at all. Finally, under

pressure, Bush reinstated both policies, but not before a tremendous

amount of money had been made on the backs of abused workers.

Remarkably, given that these are paid for by tax dollars, the

Halliburton contracts are secret. Despite the number and size of the

jobs awarded the megacontractor, “there is an utter lack of trans-

parency.”24 Laborers’ International Union of North America vice presi-

dent James Hale said, “To my knowledge, not one member of Congress

has been able to get their hands on a copy of a contract that was handed

out to Halliburton or others. There is no central registry of Katrina con-

tracts available. No data on the jobs or scope of the work.” Although

his legislative staff have attempted to obtain copies of contracts, they

were refused for reasons of “national security.” He adds, “If the con-

tracts handed out to these primary contractors are opaque, then the

contracts being let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible. . . . This

is an open invitation for exploitation, fraud and abuse.”25

What we do know is that Halliburton hired KBR—which hired sub-

contractors, who hired subcontractors, until the list of companies with

initials for names formed a “shadowy labyrinth . . . a no man’s land

where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring—and abuse—of

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these workers.”26 This line of deniability ran all the way to the job bro-

kers who hired the workers. These job brokers customarily find work-

ers by frequenting job fairs and advertising in Spanish-language

newspapers in various cities with large Hispanic populations.

According to Lovato, the ads “typically promise room, board and pay

in the range of $1200 a week.”27 One worker later said, “They gave us

two meals a day and sometimes only one.”28 Said another, “Mr.

Donaldson [CEO of KBR subcontractor DRS Cosmotech] promised us

we’d live in a hotel or a house. We lived in tents and only had hot water

that smelled of petroleum.”29 A third man, who had been working on

the naval base at Belle Chasse, Louisiana, reported, “The food was

going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing. They weren’t feed-

ing us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else.”30

Ultimately, when the workers received no pay whatsoever for their

weeks of work, the job brokers claimed they themselves had not been

paid by the subcontractors who had hired
them,
and so on up the

ladder, with avowals of nonpayment at every rung, all the way to

Halliburton—which denied the “existence of undocumented workers

providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast bases.”31 This

was a lie. Logging phone calls from workers, the Mississippi Immigrant

Rights Alliance estimated a presence of over five hundred undocu-

mented laborers on Belle Chasse alone. And an October 2005 raid on

Belle Chasse by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estab-

lished the presence of undocumented workers, as did “visits to the

naval bases and dozens of interviews by
Salon.
”32

The physical conditions under which the laborers worked are numb-

ingly familiar. For those who didn’t sleep in tents, there were run-down

trailer parks, reminiscent of those in which migrant farmworkers are

forced to live, where “up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR