Slave labor

[Bottomfeeder 244]

This is why I won't work without a union. This is the kind of crap the customers here would love to get away with. Heck, the Kuwaitis are getting away with it right under the nose of the State Department.

F-bombs in the article, but anyone with half a brain could find the lnk if they really wanted to. So, I won't post the link

A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad:

Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World's Largest Embassy

by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch

October 17th, 2006

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 ####ed 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.

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.

No Questions Asked

That's tax-free income to those desperate souls willing to prostitute their core beliefs for a few bucks. I hope the Kuwati managers and the State Department officials get theirs before it's over. Our, and our next two genrations, tax dollars at work protecting America.