Hundreds of Filipino employees have reportedly been stranded at a U.S. military base on Diego Garcia island because of a wage dispute between a U.S. contractor and the Philippine government.
U.S. contractor Kellogg Brown & Root has “emotionally blackmailed” the government by canceling all charter flights from the island to the Philippines since January, the Philippine government alleged, claiming the cancellation is a response to its pressure on the contractor to raise wages for the employees to match the minimum wage in the United States, according to the Washington Post.
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“KBR has been preventing them from returning to the Philippines to be with their families unless they sign an extension of their contract based on the old minimum wage rate,” Bernard Olalia, the undersecretary of the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers, told the outlet. “In effect, KBR is employing emotional blackmail by making their return to the Philippines conditional on their agreeing to an onerous contract. Not only is this unlawful, but it also violates the basic rights of these Filipino workers.”
Tensions have been increasing between KBR and the Philippines since the government demanded a pay raise for KBR’s employees in October 2020.
More than 1,200 primarily Filipino employees work on Diego Garcia as clerks and warehouse workers, among other jobs, according to the outlet. The clerks and warehouse workers are making $5.25 an hour, rather than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 in the U.S., according to the outlet.
The contractor has denied the allegations and claimed the flight cancellations were a request from the U.S. government because of COVID-19. However, the contractor also said there have been no chartered flights since late last year because of a lack of employees wanting to travel.
“Charter flights never had anything whatsoever to do with Philippine wage requirements, and if anyone were told that, it would have been inaccurate. We know of no employee who was told this,” KBR’s Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications Philip Ivy told the outlet.
Some employees have said they were reluctant to travel out of fear of losing their jobs, but they claimed they were informed that the cancellations of the flights were due to the employee wage dispute.
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Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago, is a British territory in the Indian Ocean that has been leased as a military base to the U.S. for the last 50 years. Due to the island’s close proximity to the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, the island serves as a naval communications, refueling, and logistics base that has played a role in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
