Thousands of migrant workers at overseas military bases claim to be victims of human trafficking. This is what The Washington Post and NBC claim following an investigation they conducted jointly with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The report states that in at least four U.S. military bases located in the Persian Gulf, workers are reportedly being recruited and subjected to abusive labor practices: allegedly, they are not allowed to change jobs, their passports are confiscated or they have to pay exorbitant amounts in illegal recruitment fees, according to the report.
The latter is precisely what happened to Mohammed. He is a young food service worker from Bangladesh and works at a base in Kuwait. And, as he tells The Washington Post, he had to pay to get a job. More specifically, he had to pay $6,000 to get a job at the Army's Camp Arifjan. "Life is not easy. My family has problems, and only I am working. I have parents, two brothers and a sister to support," explains the young man who had to work for two and a half years just to pay off the loan his father had taken out to pay the recruitment fee.
The same thing happened to Abdullah. He told his story to NBC. A story similar to Mohammed's. He had to pay about $10,250 to get a job at Tamimi Global Co. The company sent him as a dishwasher to Camp Buehring, a U.S. Army base in Kuwait. He was paid about $260 a month (far less than the salary he was originally offered, about $660) and worked 12 hours a day, with no days off for three years. As he explains to the American network, he was not the only one, 400 other workers went through the same thing. However, he says, they had no choice: they signed a contract and surrendered their passport. "What could we do? I missed my mom. I cried every day," he recounted.
Zero tolerance
The U.S. government claims that they knew nothing about the conditions faced by workers such as Abdullah and Mohammed. This is what Major Nicole Schwegman, spokeswoman for the Department of Defense, stated when journalists showed her the evidence they had collected.
The Department of Defense promotes the U.S. government's zero tolerance policy on human trafficking. The Department continues to work diligently to combat human trafficking because these activities violate human rights and harm our national security mission.
However, as NBC tells it, this may not be entirely true. During their investigation, they claim, they found a clear lack of transparency. They recount that, from 2017 through 2021, the "military itself took action in 176 incidents of labor violations by contractors and subcontractors" and that the military "substantiated violations involving more than 900 workers" in 2020 alone, according to Justice Department data.
This is corroborated by Latesha Love, director of the International Affairs and Trade team at the Government Accountability Office. She is the one who investigates human trafficking on the country's military bases. And that ratifies this research:
Our taxpayer dollars are potentially being used to support forced labor and human trafficking, and that is simply unacceptable. The way workers are treated is similar to what some might call modern slavery.
