Workers are selected from towns where traditional farm income has plummeted in the last decade.



In India, we visited two villages in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, from where hundreds of men have traveled to jobs on US military bases. Govindnagaram (pop. 6,452) and Odaipatti (pop. 13,892) lie in the bucolic valley of the Nilgiri Hills, where, as farming incomes have dropped over the past decade, residents have had to look elsewhere for work. The area has become fertile ground for recruiting agents and loan sharks looking to reap quick profits.

The agent explained that subcontractors like Ecolog do not actually pay him. Though his contract states that Ecolog owes him $300 for each worker he recruits, in reality, he said, he pays an Ecolog representative a small bribe to hire people from his candidate pool. His earnings come entirely from fees paid by job candidates. And it didn’t take long before the agent offered to give us $100 to $200 for each worker we were willing to hire from him.

Of 75 people “Fault Lines” contacted who work or formerly worked on U.S. bases across Afghanistan, 65 (87 percent) said they paid agents fees ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. Many said their monthly salaries, generally $400 to $800 in total, ran several hundred dollars short of what they had been promised. Some paid fees only to be warehoused by an agent for months, and never received a job. Nearly everyone we talked to was still paying back loans.

These people are recruited by people who charge exorbitant application fees, sometimes as much as $5,000. These recruiters then take kickbacks from US military subcontractors.And these workers are promised wages that are far beyond what they are actually paid.The problem is that most of these contractors that are hired with $15 billion of your taxpayer dollars are run by people who have connections in the Pentagon. This is the real reason for the push for perpetual warfare in Afghanistan and other places, so that contractors like these can continue to rake in perpetual profits. After all, it's the American Way (TM).

So, the next time you hear a Republican politician complaining about the economy, you can tell them that it's too bad that their friends in the Defense Department are hiring cheap labor from overseas instead of hiring American labor to support these bases. They can come back and talk to you about the economy when they have done all they can to stop these practices. Had we hired American workers, we could have created 500,000 jobs for people from this country since 2002, which would have made a significant impact on this economy.