Corpwatch has a pretty interesting read on some of the cultural aspects of the Haliburton operations in Iraq.
When I traveled through airports in the middle east pre iraq invasion, Qatar and Bahrain, the thing that struck me was the immense amount of transient workers that were imported for the oil companies. The working class seemed to be exclusively young male, either single or with families back home.
Engineers and management came in from all over western europe and the americas. More striking was the shuttling of planeload after planeload of migrant laborers from pakistan, bangladesh, and india. The entire culture of flying was different for a lot of the laborers: as opposed to the chi-chi western method of flying with a handbag and an upper class casual look, and have a very metropolitan view of things... These were workers that very much *used* the plane: dressed up in dhotis, suitcases crammed to the point of explosion with goods bought in the middle east to send back to their families, they would rowdily rush onto the planes as if it were a crowded subway...
The airport was generally there as a funnel for globalized labor on scale that I have yet to see again. The global network of headhunters and people cut across national boundaries like no other industry- paling the mexican agricultural and eastern europe/indian software labor migrations experienced in the United States.
It's easy to think of the numbers of the energy industry... And to casually talk about the causes in iraq of being an colonial war driven by a number of things, oil... But to see the scale at which the topology of human networks are warped makes me unnerved at the scale of our suicidal addiction to oil.
Posted by Da Mystik Homeboy at February 15, 2004 02:01 PM