Foreign Workers Spent Months in Warehouses

News broke last week about 1,000 workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who've spent three months in limbo, stuck in windowless warehouses in Baghdad, because, apparently, the contracts they were brought over to fulfill never materialized.

This piece from McClatchy's Adam Ashton is a detailed look, with photos, of how these folks have been living, and how they ended up there.

It's the largest story I've seen yet about the mistreatment of foreign workers in Iraq, and raises a lot of questions about equal pay, confiscated passports, and middle-men recruiters that have surfaced in past coverage.

A few days later, Deborah Haynes wrote in the Times of London that her earlier reports had gotten the attention of the International Organization for Migration, and that the workers were getting help. The contractor they'd been brought over with, Najlaa International Catering Services, said they've been "Trying to help them the whole time."

Still, these workers say their passports were confiscated once they came to Iraq -- something common to a lot of the stories about mistreatment or trafficking in third-country national workers.

According to the McClatchy story, KBR officials had even toured the warehouse recently (Najlaa was recruiting for KBR). It's amazing that so many workers were brought so far for jobs that weren't even secured yet.

A footnote to that story also mentions a camp of workers with work problems -- about 50 hopeful workers who'd paid middle men to bring them over for jobs that, it turns out, probably never existed in the first place.

ProPublica, one of the places that's been covering these stories better than anyone else in the U.S., mentioned the warehouses as part of a more general rundown of KBR's latest hits in the news -- also worth a look as more of these stories, each of them a little shocking, continue to break.