Latino ‘Slaves’ Clean Up After Katrina

Things are still a mess in New Orleans, with some illegal immigrant workers hired to clean up a damaged military base claiming they were underfed, badly housed and treated as unpaid "slave labor.”

An investigative story in Germany's Der Spiegel news magazine reported the convoluted arrangement that led to some 74 undocumented aliens allegedly being maltreated - then fired without pay for three weeks worth of work - and put out on the streets.

According to the magazine:

Illegal immigrants were lured to the U.S. by a subsidiary of the giant Halliburton firm to help clean up the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans. They were promised to be paid $8 per hour in federally approved Katrina-recovery dollars, and provided room-and-board.

After three weeks of work at the base, the underfed workers – who were living in hovels - were fired and ejected from the base. According to reports, they were never paid for their work.

Some workers were housed in what Der Spiegel described as "squalid trailer parks - 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."

The fired workers were left homeless and without jobs after being ejected from the naval base.

The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance - an immigrant rights group - recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of 74 workers allegedly owed more than $56,000.

Arnulfo Martinez , 16, recalled leaving the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, for the promise that he would make $8 an hour - plus room and board - while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job entailed cleaning up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

"I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez told Der Spiegel. "They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one."

He says that Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

Martinez told Der Spiegel that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers - many of them Mexican and undocumented - to sleep on the streets of New Orleans.

Tovar, however, told the magazine that she let the workers go because her own bosses at United Disaster Relief did not pay her. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.

Tracing the responsibility for the clean up job is a similar to solving an alphabetic puzzle. UDR, it seems, was retained by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root), which in turn is a subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR hired UDR to handle the Belle Chasse cleanup.

Relaxation of federal regulations involving employment policies allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have recently been reversed.

Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross told Der Spiegel. "In performing work for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an e-mail.

"KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions when performing this work."