Though a KBR subcontractor is accused of enslaving workers for months in Iraq, U.S. taxpayer dollars are still flowing to the company.
Houston-based KBR is the largest non-union construction company in the U.S., formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton. In 2008, the Boston Globe reported KBR avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes (maybe that's why we have a deficit) by hiring workers through shell companies it set up the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven. KBR makes billions of dollars contracting with the U.S. government.
Much of the work for which KBR contracts is done by a vast network of subcontractors such as Najlaa, the one accused of trafficking (i.e., slavery). In December 2008, South Asian workers protested outside of Baghdad because as many as a thousand of them were incarcerated in a windowless warehouse and other inhumane living quarters for as long as three months. (We call that slavery.)
The Project on Government Oversight reported,
The chain of contracting down the manpower suppliers is fueled by U.S. taxpayer dollars, billions of which KBR receives. Unrest by the labor force of a DOD subcontractor in a country with an ongoing major military operation can be detrimental to U.S. interests. It should be no wonder that elements of the U.S. military in Iraq were angered by the conditions of the Najlaa laborers, and KBR employees threatened to cut off Najlaa’s subcontracts as a result. Ultimately, however, Najlaa did not lose its business with KBR or the U.S. government ...
Besides its continuing work with KBR, Najlaa is still winning government contracts, such as a recent $3 million contract to provide food services for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Baghdad from February 2010 to February 2012.We've complained before about the Pentagon's nasty practice of using prison labor to make helmets and body armor. We've deplored the enslavement of Thai and Indian workers in U.S. shipyards and farms. And we're not at all happy about Wisconsin's new practice of replacing union workers with prisoners.
This is what we're up against. This is what the Koch brothers and KBR and the Corrections Corporation of America want -- a passive, controllable and above all cheap labor force. Slaves fit the bill nicely, don't you think?
This is what we mean when we say it's a fight for the middle class when corporate stooges like Scott Walker and Rick Scott try to privatize taxpayer assets, strip collective bargaining rights from government employees and pass right-to-work laws to destroy unions.
