Monica Perin
Secrecy shrouds Halliburton hiring frenzy
Tue Jun 24 23:07:09 2003
208.152.73.64

Secrecy shrouds Halliburton hiring frenzy at Houston hotel
Monica Perin
Houston Business Journal

A pair of Houston pest control contractors are among hundreds of American and foreign workers being recruited by a division of Houston-based Halliburton to work on the rebuilding of Iraq.

The recruitment operation is headquartered at the Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel and the Holiday Inn Intercontinental on John F. Kennedy Boulevard.

KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, is recruiting a wide array of workers from all over the world and bringing them to Houston for orientation, background checks, training and deployment.

They are being sent primarily to Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

KBR's Web site last week listed 60 job openings in Iraq, 90 in Kuwait and 50 in Afghanistan.

But the recruitment operation is being kept under tight wraps, apparently due to continuing political controversy over Halliburton's role in the lucrative post-war work.

The recruits are required to sign an agreement pledging not to talk to the media, according to one of the pest control contractors, who asked that his name not be used.

The contractor says the KBR people conducting the orientation meeting he attended last month asked if there were any reporters in the room.

The pest controller hopes to go to Kuwait and exterminate bugs there for the next five or six years -- if he can last that long. He will be leaving his family here in Houston.

But he expects to make as much as $125,000 a year, which he says is significantly more than he would make here in Houston, where he has been in business for himself since the early 1980s. He was recruited by a friend in the pest business who has already been sent off to his assignment.

The pest controller said he met recruits from a number of different countries and different trades. Before being hired, however, they must pass a physical and background check.

"It was just like an Army recruiting center," he says.

Not the usual business crowd

Milling around the lobby of the Wyndham Hotel earlier this week was a different crowd than the usual business-suited men and women who attend conferences at the hotel.

Filing into a roped-off area for lunch were young to middle-aged males wearing shorts or jeans, work boots or athletic shoes, T-shirts and caps.

A shoe-shine concessionaire at the hotel was sitting in one of his own chairs reading the newspaper.

While the KBR recruits are good business for the hotel, he said, they're not interested in shoe shines.

According to a Wyndham employee, KBR has been conducting the recruitment operation at the hotel since the first of the year and is expected to continue hiring through the end of the year and possibly into the next.

The hotel's management would not comment.

Halliburton is under contract to handle about $425 million worth of logistical support work for the Department of Defense in Iraq and Afghanistan under the U.S. Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP.

KBR first won this contract to provide basic services to the military in 1992, and was again awarded the contract in 2001.

Halliburton, which also was given a $71 million Pentagon contract to repair Iraq's oil fields, has come under fire by critics in Congress who say the company is favored by the Bush administration.

Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton before running on the Presidential ticket with George W. Bush in 2000.

Among the jobs listed on KBR's Web site for Kuwait and Iraq are health, safety and environmental inspectors; food and laundry service employees; construction and electrical contractors; truck and bus drivers; warehousemen; firefighters; and accountants.

The jobs listed earlier this week were posted between May 20 and June 1.

Representatives for KBR and Halliburton did not respond to phone calls or e-mail messages requesting comment on the recruiting program.

mperin@bizjournals.com  • 713-960-5910


© 2003 American City Business Journals Inc.
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June 25, 2003 Issue

Specialized workers and technicians have been arriving at the Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel in Houston, Texas, since the beginning of the year to compete for jobs with Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the company contracted to rebuild infrastructure in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. “The recruits are required to sign an agreement pledging not to talk to the media,” reports Monica Perin for the Houston Business Journal. But that’s a small price to pay considering the kind of money applicants can expect to make if hired. Under the U.S. Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), KBR is slated to handle $425 million worth of work for the U.S. Department of Defense in the Middle East. However, depending on whom you talk to, LOGCAP allows contractors to spend whatever they need to get the job done, and then tack on an extra 7 to 10 percent profit. That essentially amounts to an open-ended mandate and budget to send KBR anywhere in the world to run military operations at a profit. KBR employees are paid handsomely, but their salaries pale in comparison to the million-dollar-a-year pension Dick Cheney receives for his work as CEO of Halliburton, the position he held between a tour as secretary of defense for Bush Sr., and his current job as vice president.
—Nick Garafola
http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2003_74/news/10663-1.html