December 16th, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/1457237
AMY GOODMAN: Tina Susman, you recently went down to New Orleans. What did you find?
TINA SUSMAN: Well, the workers that I encountered were men who had been recruited from a homeless shelter in Atlanta. There was several dozen of them. I actually met them at a tent city that had sprung up there that was housing people who had nowhere to live. Individually they started coming up to me and all told me the same story, being recruited by a gentleman who promised them, you know, good hourly wages doing hard labor, hauling debris, for the most part, some construction work in New Orleans. They got on this school bus that was provided. They came down, and most of them had worked several weeks, and each week when they asked for their pay, they were told, It's coming. It's coming.
Eventually they got fed up and they left. I went to the house where they said that they had all been put in rather undesirable conditions, thirty or so men to the house. And there were more men there. They all told me the same story.
The big problem with these men was just finding out who was actually supposed to pay them. Their assumption, of course, was that the man who had recruited them and promised them the pay should pay them. However when they asked him for the money, he said, “Well, I can't pay you because the company that recruited me hasn't paid me.
So I spoke to that company, and it said, Well, the company that's supposed to pay us hasn't paid us, so we can't pay them.
I followed this all the way up the chain, and that is where the problem lies, with the number of subcontractors that are doing business in the Gulf region. A gentleman from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers I spoke to said, "It's not unusual to have fifty subcontractors working beneath the prime contractors.
AMY GOODMAN: And who are these prime contractors?
TINA SUSMAN: Well, there are several. In the case that I followed, the prime contractor is ECC out of Burlingame, California. It has about a $500 million contract with the Army Corps of Engineers.
AMY GOODMAN: Half a billion dollars?
TINA SUSMAN: Yes, and that's not unusual. There are several prime contractors, and these are contractors, as you mentioned -- Halliburton is another -- who are frequently given contracts by the federal government in cases such as this, and then it's understood that they are, therefore, going to hire subcontractors who will then hires subs and subs and subs.
For more follow link ...
Steve's Note: This is how gangsters operate. They ask for work upfront and then fail to pay the subcontractors. Most of the times they have the laws rigged, so they can get away with it. Thievery plain and simple, by our fearless leaders.
Previous news item ...
From: "HalliburtonWatch News"
To: news@lists.halliburtonwatch.org
Date: 16 Nov 2005 02:25:37 -0000
Subject: Halliburton hires 'Gulf Coast slaves' for hurricane cleanup - Salon
Halliburton hires 'Gulf Coast slaves' for hurricane cleanup - Salon
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 (HalliburtonWatch.org) --
Halliburton's KBR subsidiary and its subcontractors illegally abuse immigrants and undocumented workers in hurricane-damaged areas of the Gulf Coast, Roberto Lovato of Salon.com reported today.
In an article titled "Gulf Coast slaves," Lovato writes of his travels throughout the storm-ravaged region where KBR's cleanup contracts currently amount to $124.9 million. He observed "squalid trailer parks where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week."
Many suffer from work-related health problems, including diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises acquired while working for KBR.
At one point, many undocumented workers were thrown off the job and forced to live in the streets of New Orleans after Halliburton refused for two months to pay a subcontractor. Seventy-four workers filed a complaint with the Department of Labor seeking $56,000 in back pay.
A Halliburton subcontractor even threatened several Latino workers with deportation if they left the Belle Chasse military base in Louisiana, where an estimated 500 immigrants are employed.Halliburton denies violating labor laws, but immigration enforcement officials discovered undocumented workers at the Belle Chasse facility in October.
"Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities," wrote Lovato.
As in Iraq, workers from poor countries are lured to the Gulf Coast by KBR's shady job brokers peddling exaggerated wages and benefits that rarely materialize after immigrants arrive for work. "They were going to pay seven dollars an hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing," a teenage worker from Mexico told Lovato. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else," he said.
The CEO of Texas-based DRS Cosmotech, a KBR subcontractor, hung-up the phone on Lovato after he identified himself as a reporter. The CEO had reportedly promised workers they would be living in hotels or houses, but were provided tents instead."
A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers," reported Lovato.
The lack of accountability is an "open invitation for exploitation, fraud and abuse," said James Hale, vice president of the Laborers' International Union of North America.Read the explosive article on Salon.com by clicking this link: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/15/halliburton_katrina
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