As the US Justice Department cranks up its investigation into charges of labor trafficking by the Kuwaiti company currently building the $592-million US embassy compound in Baghdad, Philippine officials look to be independently pursuing reports of abuse against its nationals. In addition to the embassy project, First Kuwaiti is a major subcontractor to Halliburton’s KBR unit, which holds the multibillion-dollar service contract to support camps, dining facilities and transportation for the Pentagon.

Felixberta Romero, director of the Employment Regulation branch of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), told the OFW Journalism Consortium June 7 that the agency’s Anti-Illegal Recruitment branch will look at the recruitment agencies that have First Kuwaiti General as its foreign principal. Romero said the POEA had not yet been able to get hard facts about recruited Filipinos going to Iraq via Kuwait for First Kuwaiti.

First Kuwaiti has been on the POEA radar for some time because of complaints from Philippine nationals alleging abusive treatment, unpaid salaries and forced labor in Iraq. The company was placed on a “Watch List” on June 15, 2005, according to one high-level POEA official I interviewed in November.

“We are aware that some companies processed workers for other countries, but then they were taken to Iraq,” the official told me. “When we were informed about this, we issued advisories to employers to comply with contracts and warned them about sending workers to Iraq.”

One frequent complaint from workers is that they are not issued proper visas to work in the Middle East. That prevents them from getting the jobs they planned to have and they are then pressured to take work in Iraq. “So many were issued tourist visas,” the official said. “We have no concrete evidence, but there are so many workers with these complaints.”

The POEA official also acknowledged that many employers in the Middle East pressure Philippine workers to relinquish passports as insurance that they will stay in their jobs. That, said the official, is unacceptable.

“Passports are considered the legal property of the Philippines government. Taking them away is a violation of worker rights.”

First Kuwaiti placed a job order with POEA in November 2003 for more than 700 workers, according to the official. Only 41 of those jobs were listed for Iraq, while the remainder was advertised for being in Kuwait.

One former First Kuwaiti logistics manager who processed workers told me he witnessed the company send more than 500 Philippine laborers into Iraq in 2003 and early 2004 to work on the construction of US military camps.

Iraqslogger first reported the story that the US Justice Department is eyeing First Kuwaiti on May 31. The company, which has billed up to $2 billion under US military and State Department contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has been accused by dozens of low-paid migrant laborers from Nepal and the Philippines of forcing them to work on military camps in Iraq.

Several Americans working for First Kuwaiti at the new embassy site in Baghdad have also claimed plane loads of workers from India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Africa were issued boarding passes for Dubai, but that the planes flew directly to Baghdad instead. The workers were then transported to the embassy site inside the Green Zone. First Kuwaiti denies the allegations.

Another American reported several weeks ago to Slogger that he met workers from Ghana on the embassy site who said they were led to believe they would have jobs in Dubai but were then made to drive trucks in Iraq.

Credit for the Philippine government’s renewed interest into First Kuwait goes to journalist Lucille Quiambao. After researching and interviewing Philippine workers for several years now, her work provides the backbone of the documentary “Someone Else’s War,” recently screened for Philippine officials, according to Davao Today, and at US film festivals.

Likewise, it also showed an elaborate trail of hiring “third-country nationals” or TCNs –as these migrant laborers from the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal are called– through recruiters in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

David Phinney is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. He can be contacted at phinneydavid@yahoo.com