The ability of Halliburton to get things FUBAR never ceases to amaze me. Not only have these guys got fat contracts to rebuild the Gulf Region, Halliburton's found a new way to rake in the cash. They're
withholding paychecks for the Mexican migrant workers rebuilding the Gulf.
More on the flipside.
After Katrina hit, Armando Ojeda paid $1,200 to be smuggled across the desert border from Mexico, a walk that took several nights. Talk of $10 an hour -- more in a day than he made each week at a computer factory back home -- led him to pay another $1,200 to be crammed in van with a dozen other immigrants and driven 1,600 miles, from a safe house in Arizona to Mississippi.
The passengers were not fed -- Ojeda recalls his mouth watering when he smelled tacos the driver ate -- and were discharged near the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, where Ojeda sleepwalked though his first day clearing hurricane-strewn junk.
The job was supposed to pay $7 an hour. But six weeks later, Ojeda still hasn't been paid the $600-plus he said he is owed for eight days of dawn-to-dusk labor.
Karen Tovar, the subcontractor on the job, acknowledged she hasn't been able to pay dozens of workers a total of about $130,000. She insisted she was not at fault, blaming the way payments can be stalled along a long chain of subcontractors often led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
At one point, Tovar had 83 workers cleaning the Navy base under a broader, $12 million contract held by KBR, a firm owned by Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton.
And as always seems to be the case, one of the people who didn't want to pay employees for work done, has found a way to conflate even this with terrorism:
Elizabeth Martinez is another subcontractor who has been embroiled in wage disputes. She has been living among workers in a small tent city in Ocean Springs.
On Oct. 12, eight men who had been patching roofs asked a Texas-based immigrant worker advocate who was visiting the camp to help negotiate their pay.
As is often the case, the situation remains in dispute.
Advocate Anita Grabowski said the men, who came to Mississippi from Arkansas and have since scattered, worked two weeks and were due their money.
Bosses at the Alabama-based subcontractor that hired Martinez, Hughes Construction Services LLC, said the workers didn't understand that they weren't yet scheduled to be paid.
Martinez herself said she didn't hire the workers to lay roof tarps and that they were trying to extort money they hadn't earned an increasingly common scam, she said.
Martinez said she didn't want to pay until she checked her records. But the owners of family-run Hughes decided to front Martinez more than $15,000 to pay the men -- $10 an hour, $15 for overtime."We just wanted it to be over with," said Jody Hughes, one of three Hughes sons working the cleanup. The men were paid and agreed to find work elsewhere.
"Hughes was being intimidated" Martinez said."To me, it's like paying off damn terrorists."
Asking to be paid for work done is terrorism, talk about class warfare. And it's no just Halliburton and Hughes.:
A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi's Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed.
Sometimes, the boss simply vanishes. Other workers wait on promises that soon, someone in a complex hierarchy of contractors will provide the funds to pay them.
Nonpayment of wages is a violation of federal labor law, but these workers -- thousands of them, channeled into teams that corral debris, swaddle punctured roofs in blue tarps and gut rain-ravaged homes -- are especially vulnerable because many are here illegally.
Regardless how you feel about immigration, you know that once companies get away doing this to migrant workers next thing you know it's going to be you and I. To begin with I question why these contractors are using workers in the country illegally when there are people who've been displaced trying to make a living in the Gulf. This is Bush's America. There are those who labor, and those that enjoy the fruit of that labor, and the Bush administration seems damned intent on making the seperation clear.
Together with the bullshit that the Republicans tried to pull with Davis Bacon, this needs to be investigated, and if contractors have illegally witheld pay from their workers they need to go to prison. Not paying a man (or woman) for the work that they've done is the lowest grade of theft, it is a crime of violence because it uses the power of being an employer to steal from workers.