Slaving for Halliburton in New Orleans
Revolution #024, November 27, 2005, posted at revcom.us
After Hurricane Katrina, George Bush announced the creation of a "Gulf opportunity zone" to "rebuild" the Gulf Coast. Many of the companies getting hundreds of millions in contracts in New Orleans--like Halliburton--are also profiting off the death and misery in Iraq. (See Revolution #15, "Pigs Rush to the Trough" and "Bush’s Plan for New Orleans: Turning Devastation into Profit)
Last week Revolution reported that "entire housing projects in New Orleans have been vacated, and entire blocks are covered with debris and garbage as if the hurricane happened yesterday. House after remaining house has an X across the front, indicating that they've been declared no longer habitable. And as is becoming increasingly evident, the authorities have no intention of building housing for the people."
While thousands of poor and Black people in New Orleans continue to suffer in horrific conditions, without running water, living in the stench of mold, flooding, and toxic chemicals, corporations like Halliburton subsidiary KBR, Bechtel and others are cashing in on open-ended, no-bid reconstruction contracts. According to a representative of the Laborers International Union, copies of the contracts arent even being shown to Congress because of "national security concerns."
Bush changed federal laws and rules to allow contracted companies to pay workers below prevailing wage rates and hire undocumented immigrants. (The administration has since been forced to reverse these changes, but the original moves have already allowed massive profiteering.)
An article by Robert Lovato of Salon.com ("Gulf Coast Slaves") has revealed that subcontractors for KBR are employing hundreds of immigrants, many from Mexico, under slave-like conditions for contracted repair of military facilities in the Gulf.
On Oct. 11, Bush spoke at the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans. At this same base, hundreds of immigrants were working without pay, later to be kicked off the base and left to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. They werent even paid for three weeks of work. One worker, Arnulfo Martinez, said, "They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one."
An immigrant rights group has filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Arnulfo and 73 other workers owed more than $56,000 by a North Carolina job broker hired by KBR subcontractor United Disaster Relief.
Another KBR subcontractor, BE&K, was the subject of a Senate hearing in October because they fired 75 local Belle Chasse workers who were paid typically $22 an hour and hired immigrants for the same jobs for $8 to $14. Felipe Reyes of Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico said he was promised by the CEO of KBR subcontractor DRS Cosmotech that "wed live in a hotel or a house." Instead, "we lived in tents and only had hot water that smelled like petroleum."
According to Lovato,
"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."
Reyes said, "They didn't want to pay us for two weeks of work. So we stopped working. We started a huelga [strike] on the base." Reyes and other workers say they were only paid part of what they were owed.
Another immigrant worker hired by the same job broker as Arnulfo Martinez to work on a different KBR project said,
"They were going to pay seven dollars an hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing. They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else."
Lovato says he was taken to "squalid trailer parks" by Victoria Cintra, the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance,
" 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, who has since seen a small tent city of homeless immigrants spring up in the yard of her church Gulfport, said "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil." And she said, "the Bush administration and Halliburton have opened up a Pandora's box that's not going to close now."