The People Rebuilding Iraq - for $1.56 /hour

Migrants trade poverty for danger
Wages are simply too good to pass up

...Elsewhere in the oil-rich gulf region, where many local citizens are rich and disdain low-level jobs, governments have simply imported an entire working class. In Kuwait, for example, foreigners make up 65 percent of the population, occupying an estimated 90 to 95 percent of private-sector jobs, according to U.S. intelligence statistics. In the United Arab Emirates, 63 percent of the population is foreign, and even in Saudi Arabia, the figure is 33 percent. In Iraq, the sky-high costs of private security, wages and insurance premiums are leading many contractors to switch from American workers to citizens of poor nations. While an American truck driver in Iraq typically earns as much as $10, 000 per month and is protected by a phalanx of heavily armed private security guards, a driver from India or Pakistan typically earns as little as $500 per month and often has little or no armed security.

"There are different calculations made about security, which means different levels of protection, white-collar versus blue-collar, Western versus non-Western," said Peter Singer, an analyst of the private-security industry at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"It's not just who gets the personal security detail, but how much is spent on protection of the car or truck they're driving. Whether they get an armored SUV with the highest protection, Level 6, all the way down to nothing at all. These may be decisions about whether people live or die, but they are still business decisions," Singer said.

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"I think people are starting to worry about the danger of working in Iraq. But especially in the South Asian community, the rewards for them (in Iraq) are much higher proportionately than for American workers, so they will keep coming," said Pratap Chatterjee, director of CorpWatch, a liberal activist group in Oakland, who investigated the working conditions of migrant workers during a recent trip to Iraq. "They are incredibly desperate to get out of their countries and generate $200 a month to send back to their families."

"Iraqis are being used mostly for menial jobs, unskilled, like construction crews, but nothing more," Chatterjee said. "Iraqis see that, and they're perfectly skilled to do most of the jobs that the contractors are doing, so they're going to be angry. They have no jobs, no food, but lots of weapons."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/05/MNGSI82VEK1.DTL

Blood, Sweat & Tears:
Asia’s Poor Build U.S. Bases in Iraq

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 $80,000 a year and often topping $100,000-- that Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other laborers it recruits from the United States. Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated $615 a month – including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that would be just over $3 an hour. But for the 12-hour day, seven-day week that Soliman says was standard for him and many contractor employees in Iraq, he actually earned $1.56 an hour.

Soliman planned to send most of his $7,380 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, and the World Bank estimates that nearly half of the nation's 84 million people live on less than $2 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.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675

Emotional cost of Philippine exodus

There are millions of children like Marc Anthony, being raised by a relative because one or both parents work overseas.

...The $8bn they send home each year helps their relatives and gives vital support to an economy burdened by debt, corruption, tax evasion and poverty. But it also creates other problems, such as a loss of skills in their home country.

"At least 73% of workers are women, and the jobs they go into are usually in the service sector," said Malou Alcid, who teaches social work at the University of the Philippines.

"Many of them are college graduates, so you have over-qualified women taking on domestic work because the salary is better than what they would get here as a teacher or an engineer."

Mia Nabulenai, who has three children and a husband with no job, is a case in point.

She used to be a supervisor at a hotel, but decided to go to an overseas employment agency in Manila in the hope of getting work as a laundry woman at one of the US military bases in Iraq.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3651246.stm