The Mercenary’s Cookbook

Okay… what soldier doesn’t march through some Baghdad street, exchanging the evil eye with the locals, and think, “I could paid four times as much working for Dyncorp.” Well, the private sector does have its down side:

AN AMERICAN security guard recruited by DynCorp International to serve at the As Sayliyah base has been “stranded” in Qatar for over a year after he was sacked by his employers in April 2007.

Remember, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal? I’m betting this guy wishes he was stuck in an airport.

What’s worse is this disgruntled (to put it mildly) employee claims it was all a negotiating tactic on the part of Dyncorp:

“[T]hings started to fall apart as I arrived here in October 2006. I was forced to sign an employment contract in which the emoluments were less than what had been promised and agreed in the US.

“One of the major setbacks was the absence of a pension plan which figured prominently in the promises made in the US. There was also a shortfall of about $15,000 in the annual package in the new offer.”
 

According to him, things came to a head when he, along with eleven other contractors, complained to Qatar’s Labour Department. Then Dyncorp refused to pay up, so they fired him and told him to take the next plane home. So he gets an injunction against his deportation so his suit could go forward, and his former employers handed over his passport to the police and reported him as an absconder.

Dyncorp managed to dodge service for three months, and he sat, waiting around in Dyncorp housing for over a year to have his day in court. That is, until this past week when the company tried to have him evicted, which is what prompted him to go to the paper. The American embassy couldn’t help because it was a “civil matter”, which is a clever way of placing PMC’s outside of the law — US laws don’t apply because they are in Qatar, Qatar is dragging its feet about getting involved in a dispute between an American company and American employee, and the US embassy won’t get involved because… I don’t know why.

Dyncorp employees have been pushing on various fronts to find some avenue for compensation or accountability of the Guantanamos of business law. A former sub-conractor testified before Congress that a comrade would not have been killed if the armored  car was not being used to transport prostitutes to Dyncorp hotels. In 2002, two former employees won in court after Dyncorp fired them for blowing the whistle on the trafficing of sex slaves in Bosnia.