of recruiting migrant laborers has been booming (Simpson 2005). In the case of KBR, migrant
employees are recruited and then hired by regional sub-subcontractors, such as Morning Star.
The vast supply of low-wage migrant labor is absolutely critical to the calculations
involved in the military outsourcing support services in the first place. In the face of criticism
regarding the high wages earned by KBR’s truck drivers (who generally are U.S. citizens), Paul
Cerjan, vice president of Kellogg Brown & Root Worldwide Military Affairs, points out that the
privatization of services saves taxpayer dollars precisely because of low-wage migrant labor. As
he puts the matter, “Wait a minute now. You’re paying some people more money…. There’s an
American truck driver who gets more money, but you don’t take into account the third-country
nationals we hired at less wage, because they can come over here and do it cheaper. They don’t
have deployment issues that they have to contend with. They don’t have mobilization issues—
that’s on their nickel. We use subcontractors from around the area so you don’t have to mobilize
them. They take care of their own living conditions and what have you” (Cerjan 2005). Migrants
working in reproductive arenas of food preparation, laundry, and cleaning services make a very
low wage and so end up costing KBR, and U.S. taxpayers, far less. Whereas the military
estimates that a soldier costs about $100,000 a year in pay, benefits, and training, migrant
workers earn only about $20 a day (Brodie 2007; Raz 2007). Labor practices that are commonly
enforced in the United States do not apply, since migrant workers are the employees of any one
of the hundreds of regional subcontractors. Therefore far more labor can be extracted from each
migrant worker. For example, the Saudi-based food services firm Tamimi contracts migrant
workers to work in U.S. bases for two years at $1.25 an hour and, on average, migrant service
workers work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week (Raz 2007). But not only does the outsourcing
of reproductive services represent a remarkable and, in light of these labor conditions, unsettling
6
Convention