David Phinney

WASHINGTON, Oct 13 2005 (IPS) — Jing Soliman left his family in the Philippines for what sounded like a sure thing – a job as a warehouse worker at Camp Anaconda in Iraq.

His new employer, Prime Projects International (PPI) of Dubai, is a major, but low-profile, subcontractor to Halliburton’s multi-billion-dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide support services to U.S. forces.

But Soliman wouldn’t be making anything near the salaries – starting at 80,000 dollars a year and often topping 100,000 dollars – that Halliburton’s engineering and construction unit Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other labourers it recruits from the United States.

Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated 615 dollars a month, including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that would be just over three dollars an hour. But for the 12-hour day, seven-day week that Soliman says was standard for him and many contract employees in Iraq, he actually earned 1.56 dollars an hour.

Soliman planned to send most of his 7,380-dollar annual pay home to his family in the Philippines, where the combined unemployment and underemployment rate tops 28 percent. The average annual income in Manila is 4,384 dollars, and the World Bank estimates that nearly half of the nation’s 84 million people live on less than two dollars a day.

“I am an ordinary man,” said Soliman during a recent telephone interview from his home in Quezon City near Manila. “It was good money.”

His ambitions, like many U.S. civilians working in Iraq, were modest: “I wanted to save up, buy a house and provide for my family,” he says.

That simple dream drives tens of thousands of low-wage workers like Soliman to travel to Iraq from more than three dozen countries. They are lured by jobs with companies working on projects led by Halliburton and other major U.S.-funded contractors hired to provide support services to the military and reconstruction efforts.

Called “third country nationals” (TCNs) in contractors’ parlance, these labourers hail largely from impoverished Asian countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan, as well as from Turkey and countries in the Middle East.

Once in Iraq, TCNs earn monthly salaries between 200 and 1,000 dollars as truck drivers, construction workers, carpenters, warehousemen, laundry workers, cooks, accountants, beauticians, and similar blue-collar jobs.

Tens of thousands of such TCN labourers have helped set new records for the largest civilian workforce ever hired in support of a U.S. war.

They are employed through complex layers of companies working in Iraq, including dozens of small subcontractors – largely based in the Middle East – like PPI. This layered system not only cuts costs for the prime contractors, but also creates an untraceable trail of contracts that clouds the liability of companies and hinders comprehensive oversight by U.S. contract auditors.

Numerous former U.S. contractors returning home say they were shocked at conditions faced by this mostly invisible, but indispensable army of low-paid workers.

TCNs frequently sleep in crowded trailers and wait outside in line in 100 degree-plus heat to eat “slop”. Many are said to lack adequate medical care and put in hard labour seven days a week, 10 hours or more a day, for little or no overtime pay. Few receive proper workplace safety equipment or adequate protection from incoming mortars and rockets.

Adding to these dangers and hardships, some TCNs complain publicly about not being paid the wages they expected. Others say their employers use “bait-and-switch” tactics: recruiting them for jobs in Kuwait or other Middle Eastern countries and then pressuring them to go to Iraq. All of these problems have resulted in labour disputes, strikes and on-the-job protests.

While the exact number of TCNs working in Iraq is uncertain, a rough estimate can be gleaned from Halliburton’s own numbers, which indicate that TCNs make up 35,000 of KBR’s 48,000 workers in Iraq employed under its sweeping contract for military support.

“They do all the grunt jobs,” said former KBR supervisor Steve Powell, from Azle, Texas. “But a lot of them are top notch.”

The TCNs not only do much of the dirty work, but, like others working for the U.S. military, risk and sometimes lose their lives. Many are killed in mortar attacks; some are shot. Others have been taken hostage before meeting their death.

The Pentagon keeps no comprehensive record of TCN casualties. But the Georgia-based nonprofit, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, estimates that TCNs make up more than 100 of the estimated 269 civilian fatalities. The number of unreported fatalities could be much higher, while unreported and life-altering injuries are legion.

Soliman was one TCN who barely escaped death on the night of May 11, 2004, when his living trailer at Camp Anaconda was blown apart by a bomb attack. Sardonically dubbed “Mortaritaville”, the camp sits 42 miles north of Baghdad. Some 17,000 US soldiers and thousands of contractors have dug into the former Iraqi airbase for a long-term occupation.

Three others were injured along with Soliman that night. One roommate, 25-year-old fuel pump attendant Raymund Natividad, was killed. Soliman flew home to the Philippines in a wheelchair days later because he wanted medical treatment in his own country.

But even after surgery and skin grafts, he sometimes feels nagging pain in his leg, he says. Doctors tell Soliman he will walk with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his left leg for the rest of his life.

“It was too deep” to remove, he explains.

A number of former KBR supervisors say they don’t know why TCNs continue working in Iraq when they face much more brutal working conditions and hours than what their U.S. and European co-workers would tolerate.

“TCNs had a lot of problems with overtime and things,” recalls Sharon Reynolds of Kirbyville, Texas. “I remember one time that they didn’t get paid for four months.”

The former KBR administrator, who spent 11 months in Iraq until April, says she was responsible for processing time sheets for 665 TCNs employed by PPI at Camp Victory near Baghdad. The 14,000 troops and the U.S. contractors based at this former palace for Saddam Hussein have use of an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a manmade lake preserved for special events and fishing.

But TCNs have to make do with far less. They “ate outside in 140 degree heat”, Reynolds says, while U.S. contractors and troops ate at the air-conditioned Pegasus Dining Facility featuring a short-order grill, salad, pizza, sandwich and ice cream bars under the KBR logistics contract.

“TCNs had to stand in line with plates and were served something like be curry and fish heads from big old pots,” Reynolds says incredulously. “It looked like a concentration camp.”

And even when it came to basic safety, the TCNs faced a double standard. “They didn’t have personal protection equipment to wear when there was an alert,” Reynolds said. “Here we are walking around with helmets and vests because of an alert and they are just looking at us wondering what’s going on.”

Although Filipino passports now explicitly ban entry into Iraq, the ranks of Filipinos sneaking over the border from neighbouring countries has swelled from an estimated 4,000 before the 2003 ban to 6,000 today.

Filipinos “believe it is better to work in Iraq with their lives in danger rather than face the danger of not having breakfast, lunch, or dinner in the Philippines,” said Maita Santiago, secretary-general for Migrante International, an organisation that defends the rights of more than a million overseas Filipino workers.

Soliman now finds his problems with PPI and injuries in Iraq pale in comparison to life back in the Philippines. Jobless, he sees his life teetering on the edge. He may be splitting up with his wife, and plans for providing a new home to his family are on hold.

He says he doubts that PPI will be sending money for his final medical checkup or even the several months salary he says he is still owed. But those things don’t matter so much.

What really matters now is finding another job. “If you hear of anything, let me know,” Soliman said at the end of the interview. “I would even go back to Iraq.”