Gulf Coast Slaves
Gulf Coast Slaves
Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino
workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them
out without pay.
Nov. 15, 2005 | Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del
ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse
Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he
didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was
saying to the troops.
Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left
the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that
he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a
subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was
awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief
work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region
devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up
branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken
Spanish.
Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans
that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he
couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three
weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen
Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR
subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and
left him homeless, hungry and without money.
"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.
He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup
workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets
of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks
of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the
Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly
owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go
because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In
turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this
story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been
paid by KBR for two months.
Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is
stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many
workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown &
Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military
bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president
of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of
undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the
military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle
Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of
interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the
facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to
their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. 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.
Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush
administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant
abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush
suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing
wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration
also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to
provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers.
These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire
undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages
the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have
recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush
reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland
Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it
would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in
violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have
already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and
political cover.
Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United
States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its
proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO.
Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly
to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work
for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement
system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an
e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable
labor laws and provisions when performing this work."
Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi
Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency
Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR
is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal
treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal
Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like
the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people
fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up,
chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges
of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow
legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at
Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval
base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.
I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers
who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to
leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to
squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport --
where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a
single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases
complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises,
and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no
medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same
bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.
Cintra and other critics say there's been no accountability from the
corporate leaders who signed on the dotted line when they were awarded
multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contracts. "The workers may be
hired by the subcontractors," Cintra says, "but KBR is ultimately responsible."
"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the
proper conditions to protect them," adds Cintra, who recently provided
tents to Martinez and several other unpaid Mexican workers who fled Belle
Chasse for Gulfport after being dismissed by Tovar. Cintra, a Cuban exile
and born-again Christian, has since seen a small tent city of homeless
immigrants spring up in the yard of her church, Pass Road Baptist, in
Gulfport. "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil," she says. "The Bush
administration and Halliburton have opened up a Pandora's box that's not
going to close now."
Halliburton/KBR is the general contractor with overarching responsibility
for the federal cleanup contracts covering Katrina-damaged naval bases.
Even so, there is an utter lack of transparency with the process -- and
that invites malfeasance, says James Hale, a vice president of the
Laborers' International Union of North America. "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," Hale says. "There is no
central registry of Katrina contracts available. No data on the jobs or
scope of the work." Hale says that his union's legislative staff has
pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the
legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts
because of "national security" concerns.
"If the contracts handed out to these primary contractors are opaque, then
the contracts being let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible,"
Hale says. "There is simply no ability to ascertain or monitor the
contractor-subcontractor relationships. This is an open invitation for
exploitation, fraud and abuse."
Congress has heard a number of complaints recently about Halliburton/KBR's
hiring practices, including the alleged exploitation of Filipino, Sri
Lankan, Nepalese and other immigrant workers paid low wages on military
installations in Iraq. And KBR subcontractor BE&K was a focus of Senate
hearings in October, for the firing of 75 local Belle Chasse workers who
said that they were replaced by "unskilled, out-of-state, out-of-country"
workers earning $8 to $14 for work that typically paid $22 an hour.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has been an outspoken critic of the use of
undocumented workers at Belle Chasse and on other Katrina cleanup jobs,
said in a recent statement, "It is a downright shame that any contractor
would use this tragedy as an opportunity to line its pockets by breaking
the law and hiring a low-skilled, low-wage and undocumented work force."
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., is also against the practice, citing its "serious
social ramifications." As he told Salon, it devastates "local workers who
have been hit twice, because they lost their homes."
Seventeen-year-old Simitrio Martinez (no relation to Arnulfo) is another
one of the dozens of workers originally hired by Tovar, the North Carolina
job broker working under KBR. "They were going to pay seven dollars an
hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us
nothing," says the thin Zapotec teenager. Simitrio spent nearly a month at
the Seabee base. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days.
Cookies, nothing else," he says.
Simitrio, his co-workers, and the dozens of KBR subcontractors that employ
them operate under public-private agreements like federal Task Order 0017,
which defines the scope of work to be fulfilled under the contracts. Under
the multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contract, KBR is supposed to
provide services for "Hurricane Katrina stabilization and recovery at Naval
Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Air Station Gulfport, Stennis Space Center
and other Navy installations in the Southeast Region," according to a
Defense Department press release.
But the details of the agreements remain murky. "Not only is it very
difficult to see the actual signed DoD contracts, but it is nearly
impossible to see the actual task orders, which assign the goods or
services the government is buying," says Scott Amey, general counsel for
the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. The military can ask for
goods and services on an as-needed basis, he says, which means that the
contracts, which add up to tens of millions of dollars, can remain open
ended. According to DoD press statements, the contracts call for
considerable manual labor, including "re-roofing of most buildings,
barracks, debris removal from the entire base, water mitigation, mold
mitigation, interior and exterior repairs to most buildings, waste
treatment plants, and all incidental related work."
Simitrio and any other workers on the high-security military bases must get
permission before entering the guarded gates, where they get patted down by
M-16-wielding military police. Responsibility for getting private-sector
construction and cleanup workers on the bases rests with the general
contractor -- in KBR's case, security chief Kevin Flynn. One of Flynn's
responsibilities is to negotiate passes and entry for KBR subcontractors --
and their hires -- to do the work stipulated by the task order.
Yet, following several complaints by Landrieu, and just a few days after
President Bush visited the Belle Chasse base, agents from the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency raided the facility and detained 10 workers
who ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback said had "questionable" documentation.
Representatives of Halliburton/KBR do not acknowledge the existence of
undocumented workers providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast
bases. Flynn suggested speaking to the U.S. military, who he said "has real
strict control" and would know whether there were undocumented workers. "We
have workers from all ethnic groups on the base," Flynn said. "To the best
of my knowledge, there are no undocumented workers."
Steve Romano, head of housing on the Belle Chasse base, said, "We have no
relationship with [KBR] at all. I have no idea what that's about." A
similar response was given by an official at the base's health facility
when asked about undocumented workers who complained about health issues
and injuries sustained on the KBR sites. The only military person to
acknowledge seeing Latino workers was a watch commander who greeted me at
an entry to the base. The commander estimated there were 100 such workers
there. Meanwhile, representatives with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights
Alliance say they received calls from undocumented workers at Belle Chasse
who estimated there were more than 500, or "about eight busloads" of
immigrant workers on-site.
Texas-based DRS Cosmotech is another subcontractor that provided cleanup
crews to Halliburton/KBR in the Gulf. Roy Lee Donaldson, CEO of the
company, refused to respond to accusations of non-payment and exploitation
leveled at his company by several workers, including 55-year-old Felipe
Reyes of Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. (Donaldson hung up the phone when I
identified myself as a reporter.)
"Mr. Donaldson promised us we'd live in a hotel or a house. We lived in
tents and only had hot water that smelled like petroleum," Reyes said. The
city of Belle Chasse has been identified in recent years as one of the most
toxically polluted areas in the entire region, with several major energy
companies operating there. A wide range of advocacy groups have warned
about serious health risks facing Katrina cleanup workers.
"They didn't want to pay us for two weeks of work. So we stopped working.
We started a huelga [strike] on the base" added Reyes, who along with other
workers, says he was later paid $1,100 -- only part of what he says he was
owed.
Another KBR subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, says it is not responsible
for keeping track of the workers. BE&K spokesperson Susan Wasley said, "I
can't say that we require our subcontractors' employees to produce
documentation for us, because that's what our subcontractor as employer has
to do. That's his responsibility."
At the bottom of the KBR subcontracting pyramid are job brokers like Tovar
and Gregorio Gonzalez, who helped hire laborers for Florida-based On Site
Services, another subcontractor that reportedly failed to pay wages owed to
workers in the Gulf Coast. The job brokers find workers by placing ads in
Spanish-language newspapers like La Subasta and El Dia in Houston; the ads
typically promise room, board and pay in the range of $1,200 a week. Job
brokers also run television ads on Spanish-language stations like
Univision. And they attend job fairs in places like Fresno, Calif.
Not all subcontractors refuse to discuss their links to KBR. Luis Sevilla
is pretty open about it if you can get to the crowded hangar on the
restricted premises of the Seabee naval base where he and his crew sleep
and work. Sevilla put together crews for KBR subcontractors to remove
asbestos and do other construction work; his workers told me they are paid
and treated well. Asked about the people who own the R.V. with a "KBR" logo
outside the hangar where his workers crowd into small tents, Sevilla says,
"They contract with many, many companies." Interviews with members of
Sevilla's crew revealed a number of undocumented workers.
Despite the evidence of undocumented workers cleaning up after Katrina,
Halliburton/KBR maintains that it runs its operations within the bounds of
the law. "KBR operates under a rigorous Code of Business Conduct that
outlines legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors
are expected to follow in every aspect of their work," spokesperson
Norcross said by e-mail. (She did not respond to several requests for a
phone interview.) "We do not tolerate any exceptions to this Code at any
level of our company."
Standing in spitting distance of the KBR-branded R.V., which is parked as
if it were guarding the hangar, Jose Ruiz of Nicaragua knows that his role
in the Katrina cleanup is anonymous at best. "I don't have any papers, kind
of like in that song by Sting -- 'I'm an illegal alien,'" says Ruiz, who
lived in the United States for many years before arriving to work for
Sevilla at the Seabee base. "That's the way it is."
-- By Roberto Lovato
x-posted up the wazoo
Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino
workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them
out without pay.
Nov. 15, 2005 | Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del
ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse
Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he
didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was
saying to the troops.
Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left
the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that
he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a
subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was
awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief
work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region
devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up
branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken
Spanish.
Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans
that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he
couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three
weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen
Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR
subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and
left him homeless, hungry and without money.
"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.
He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup
workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets
of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks
of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the
Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly
owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go
because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In
turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this
story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been
paid by KBR for two months.
Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is
stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many
workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown &
Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military
bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president
of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of
undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the
military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle
Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of
interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the
facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to
their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. 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.
Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush
administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant
abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush
suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing
wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration
also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to
provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers.
These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire
undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages
the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have
recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush
reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland
Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it
would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in
violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have
already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and
political cover.
Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United
States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its
proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO.
Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly
to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work
for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement
system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an
e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable
labor laws and provisions when performing this work."
Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi
Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency
Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR
is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal
treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal
Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like
the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people
fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up,
chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges
of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow
legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at
Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval
base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.
I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers
who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to
leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to
squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport --
where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a
single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases
complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises,
and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no
medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same
bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.
Cintra and other critics say there's been no accountability from the
corporate leaders who signed on the dotted line when they were awarded
multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contracts. "The workers may be
hired by the subcontractors," Cintra says, "but KBR is ultimately responsible."
"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the
proper conditions to protect them," adds Cintra, who recently provided
tents to Martinez and several other unpaid Mexican workers who fled Belle
Chasse for Gulfport after being dismissed by Tovar. Cintra, a Cuban exile
and born-again Christian, has since seen a small tent city of homeless
immigrants spring up in the yard of her church, Pass Road Baptist, in
Gulfport. "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil," she says. "The Bush
administration and Halliburton have opened up a Pandora's box that's not
going to close now."
Halliburton/KBR is the general contractor with overarching responsibility
for the federal cleanup contracts covering Katrina-damaged naval bases.
Even so, there is an utter lack of transparency with the process -- and
that invites malfeasance, says James Hale, a vice president of the
Laborers' International Union of North America. "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," Hale says. "There is no
central registry of Katrina contracts available. No data on the jobs or
scope of the work." Hale says that his union's legislative staff has
pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the
legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts
because of "national security" concerns.
"If the contracts handed out to these primary contractors are opaque, then
the contracts being let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible,"
Hale says. "There is simply no ability to ascertain or monitor the
contractor-subcontractor relationships. This is an open invitation for
exploitation, fraud and abuse."
Congress has heard a number of complaints recently about Halliburton/KBR's
hiring practices, including the alleged exploitation of Filipino, Sri
Lankan, Nepalese and other immigrant workers paid low wages on military
installations in Iraq. And KBR subcontractor BE&K was a focus of Senate
hearings in October, for the firing of 75 local Belle Chasse workers who
said that they were replaced by "unskilled, out-of-state, out-of-country"
workers earning $8 to $14 for work that typically paid $22 an hour.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has been an outspoken critic of the use of
undocumented workers at Belle Chasse and on other Katrina cleanup jobs,
said in a recent statement, "It is a downright shame that any contractor
would use this tragedy as an opportunity to line its pockets by breaking
the law and hiring a low-skilled, low-wage and undocumented work force."
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., is also against the practice, citing its "serious
social ramifications." As he told Salon, it devastates "local workers who
have been hit twice, because they lost their homes."
Seventeen-year-old Simitrio Martinez (no relation to Arnulfo) is another
one of the dozens of workers originally hired by Tovar, the North Carolina
job broker working under KBR. "They were going to pay seven dollars an
hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us
nothing," says the thin Zapotec teenager. Simitrio spent nearly a month at
the Seabee base. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days.
Cookies, nothing else," he says.
Simitrio, his co-workers, and the dozens of KBR subcontractors that employ
them operate under public-private agreements like federal Task Order 0017,
which defines the scope of work to be fulfilled under the contracts. Under
the multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contract, KBR is supposed to
provide services for "Hurricane Katrina stabilization and recovery at Naval
Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Air Station Gulfport, Stennis Space Center
and other Navy installations in the Southeast Region," according to a
Defense Department press release.
But the details of the agreements remain murky. "Not only is it very
difficult to see the actual signed DoD contracts, but it is nearly
impossible to see the actual task orders, which assign the goods or
services the government is buying," says Scott Amey, general counsel for
the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. The military can ask for
goods and services on an as-needed basis, he says, which means that the
contracts, which add up to tens of millions of dollars, can remain open
ended. According to DoD press statements, the contracts call for
considerable manual labor, including "re-roofing of most buildings,
barracks, debris removal from the entire base, water mitigation, mold
mitigation, interior and exterior repairs to most buildings, waste
treatment plants, and all incidental related work."
Simitrio and any other workers on the high-security military bases must get
permission before entering the guarded gates, where they get patted down by
M-16-wielding military police. Responsibility for getting private-sector
construction and cleanup workers on the bases rests with the general
contractor -- in KBR's case, security chief Kevin Flynn. One of Flynn's
responsibilities is to negotiate passes and entry for KBR subcontractors --
and their hires -- to do the work stipulated by the task order.
Yet, following several complaints by Landrieu, and just a few days after
President Bush visited the Belle Chasse base, agents from the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency raided the facility and detained 10 workers
who ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback said had "questionable" documentation.
Representatives of Halliburton/KBR do not acknowledge the existence of
undocumented workers providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast
bases. Flynn suggested speaking to the U.S. military, who he said "has real
strict control" and would know whether there were undocumented workers. "We
have workers from all ethnic groups on the base," Flynn said. "To the best
of my knowledge, there are no undocumented workers."
Steve Romano, head of housing on the Belle Chasse base, said, "We have no
relationship with [KBR] at all. I have no idea what that's about." A
similar response was given by an official at the base's health facility
when asked about undocumented workers who complained about health issues
and injuries sustained on the KBR sites. The only military person to
acknowledge seeing Latino workers was a watch commander who greeted me at
an entry to the base. The commander estimated there were 100 such workers
there. Meanwhile, representatives with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights
Alliance say they received calls from undocumented workers at Belle Chasse
who estimated there were more than 500, or "about eight busloads" of
immigrant workers on-site.
Texas-based DRS Cosmotech is another subcontractor that provided cleanup
crews to Halliburton/KBR in the Gulf. Roy Lee Donaldson, CEO of the
company, refused to respond to accusations of non-payment and exploitation
leveled at his company by several workers, including 55-year-old Felipe
Reyes of Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. (Donaldson hung up the phone when I
identified myself as a reporter.)
"Mr. Donaldson promised us we'd live in a hotel or a house. We lived in
tents and only had hot water that smelled like petroleum," Reyes said. The
city of Belle Chasse has been identified in recent years as one of the most
toxically polluted areas in the entire region, with several major energy
companies operating there. A wide range of advocacy groups have warned
about serious health risks facing Katrina cleanup workers.
"They didn't want to pay us for two weeks of work. So we stopped working.
We started a huelga [strike] on the base" added Reyes, who along with other
workers, says he was later paid $1,100 -- only part of what he says he was
owed.
Another KBR subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, says it is not responsible
for keeping track of the workers. BE&K spokesperson Susan Wasley said, "I
can't say that we require our subcontractors' employees to produce
documentation for us, because that's what our subcontractor as employer has
to do. That's his responsibility."
At the bottom of the KBR subcontracting pyramid are job brokers like Tovar
and Gregorio Gonzalez, who helped hire laborers for Florida-based On Site
Services, another subcontractor that reportedly failed to pay wages owed to
workers in the Gulf Coast. The job brokers find workers by placing ads in
Spanish-language newspapers like La Subasta and El Dia in Houston; the ads
typically promise room, board and pay in the range of $1,200 a week. Job
brokers also run television ads on Spanish-language stations like
Univision. And they attend job fairs in places like Fresno, Calif.
Not all subcontractors refuse to discuss their links to KBR. Luis Sevilla
is pretty open about it if you can get to the crowded hangar on the
restricted premises of the Seabee naval base where he and his crew sleep
and work. Sevilla put together crews for KBR subcontractors to remove
asbestos and do other construction work; his workers told me they are paid
and treated well. Asked about the people who own the R.V. with a "KBR" logo
outside the hangar where his workers crowd into small tents, Sevilla says,
"They contract with many, many companies." Interviews with members of
Sevilla's crew revealed a number of undocumented workers.
Despite the evidence of undocumented workers cleaning up after Katrina,
Halliburton/KBR maintains that it runs its operations within the bounds of
the law. "KBR operates under a rigorous Code of Business Conduct that
outlines legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors
are expected to follow in every aspect of their work," spokesperson
Norcross said by e-mail. (She did not respond to several requests for a
phone interview.) "We do not tolerate any exceptions to this Code at any
level of our company."
Standing in spitting distance of the KBR-branded R.V., which is parked as
if it were guarding the hangar, Jose Ruiz of Nicaragua knows that his role
in the Katrina cleanup is anonymous at best. "I don't have any papers, kind
of like in that song by Sting -- 'I'm an illegal alien,'" says Ruiz, who
lived in the United States for many years before arriving to work for
Sevilla at the Seabee base. "That's the way it is."
-- By Roberto Lovato
x-posted up the wazoo