... There were no more jobs at the hotel, Autencio was told, and because the recruiter only processed him for a one-month travel visa, he was told he could not stay in Kuwait. Autencio said First Kuwaiti offered him one of three options: pay a 1,000-dollar penalty and work in Kuwait for free for six months; be arrested and jailed; or work for the company in Iraq.
As he weighed these choices, he would live in the building with 800 other Filipinos where, at first, there were no mattresses or blankets. They ate only chicken and rice under the crumbling ceilings. Because Autencio had worked in Kuwait before, he says he was able to borrow cooking utensils from supportive Filipinos in Kuwait aware of their plight...
... Autencio says he ended up living a wartime nightmare, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a U.S. military camp in Tikrit.
Showers to wash off the day's sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck container with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes, and eat leftovers and meals-ready-to-eat from soldiers.
“A jail would be better,”Autencio recalled. “We were ordered to go...They forcibly brought us to Iraq.”
Autencio’s work agreement with First Kuwaiti stated that he would be paid “346 dollars a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus 104 dollars a month for mandatory two hours overtime every day.” When calculated, that comes out to just less than $1.50/hour.
It has been noted that workers were handed boarding passes for Dubai and instead shipped to Iraq. The Asia Times reported John Owen’s story in October 2006, which involved an incident involving the handing of boarding passes to laborers that were for Dubai:
"I thought there was some sort of mix-up and I was getting on the
wrong plane," said the 48-year-old Floridian, who was working as a general construction foreman on the embassy project.
He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing nearby and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet. "If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won't let us on the plane," Owen recalled the manager saying.
The secrecy struck Owen as a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. "I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq.”
According to the Asia Times, John Owen, who had experience working on embassiesp prior to working on the Baghdad embassy, said, “Not one of the five different US embassy sites [he] had worked on around the world previously compared to the mess. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption[s], but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional.”
He added, “I've never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."
Owen submitted a resignation letter in June of 2006 and informed First Kuwaiti and the U.S. State Department that “his managers physically assaulted and beat the construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety and routinely breached security.” He added, “It was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone, he said - right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract.”
Krongard’s office admitted during the week of June 18, 2007, that it had given First Kuwaiti a three-month notice before Krongard’s inspection of the embassy site.
And in April 2006, “the Pentagon confirmed in a new contracting order that an investigation of U.S.-funded contractors in Iraq found significant evidence of deceptive hiring practices, excessive recruiting fees indebting workers for months if not years, substandard living conditions that include crammed sleeping quarters and poor food, and the circumventing of Iraqi immigration procedures.” Also, the contracting order mentioned that employers “illegally confiscated” passports and that First Kuwait lacked the mandatory “awareness training” of labor trafficking.
Not only did Krongard permit labor practices that violated U.S. labor laws and U.S. labor-trafficking laws, but he allowed for a two-person minority-owned consulting company called MSDS to be hired by First Kuwaiti so that they could offer medical services that the firm had never before offered to laborers. This was done as part of a recommendation by Jim Golden, the State Department contract official in charge of overseeing the embassy project.
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