In an email home on September 29, Brayden described how the US multinational Halliburton took over the lucrative laundry facilities at the Baghdad airport.
Stationed here at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) for the past year, we saw the local Iraqis open up a laundry facility on post last summer. It was quite a relief to know that we wouldn't have to wash our own clothes by hand (nothing worse than endeavouring to get Iraqi sand out of your socks).
The BIAP Laundry Service, at the southern end of the airport, a half-way point between BIAP-West and BIAP-East, opened up at the southern end of the airport, and quickly grew in size.
Pretty soon it was handling the drudgery of washing soldiers' dirty T-shirts, underwear and uniforms, for everyone stationed here — more than 30,000 soldiers and civilians.
Of course, they had some hiccups running such a large operation ... [however] overall they did a good job with a one-day turnaround on most bags. It was entirely Iraqi run — managed by an English-speaking Iraqi woman of about 45 — which many soldiers liked, also because they could drive over to check out the young Iraqi girls who also worked there.
A couple of months ago, Kellog, Brown & Root (KBR), the Halliburton subsidiary that has so many lucrative military contracts with the US government decided that it, too, wanted to get in on the laundry business.
They opened up two laundry facilities; one on BIAP-West, right down the street from my battalion's encampment, and one on BIAP-East, a couple of blocks down from the Iraqi-run operation.
It didn't matter to me, because I kept taking my laundry to the Iraqi-run BIAP laundry. I liked the people; they were there first, and I thought it made good sense to support a local operation.
I found out yesterday, however, that KBR had out-bid the BIAP Laundry Service and my little Iraqi-run operation is closing down. Now, we'll have no choice but to use the KBR laundry facilities.
This makes me a little disheartened, because KBR chooses not to employ local Iraqis in any of its operations. Not only did a good local Iraqi business get shut out by a big American competitor, good local Iraqi people that want and need work are being shut out every day by an American corporation that is importing cheap labourers instead of using the locals.
I'm no businessman, but something tells me somebody is getting rich off of the US occupation of Iraq, and it's not the Iraqi people.
From Green Left Weekly, March 9, 2005.
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