Employers, more than ever before, need to protect themselves against accidents and crimes committed by their employees. With negligent hiring, lawsuits, training costs, workplace violence and theft on the rise, pre-employment screening as well as taking the correct pre-employment screening steps are no longer an option, but rather a necessity for businesses.

Jamie Leigh Jones was 19 years old when she was hired as an administrative assistant at Kellogg & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.

When a job opened up for her in Iraq, Jones ignored the danger and jumped at the chance to make some money to support her seriously ill mother.

After being in Iraq for only four days, Jones says she was drugged and gang-raped in the co-ed barracks by several of her male co-workers, and according to court documents, she says she woke up badly beat-up, bruised and bloody. According to Jones, what happened next was even more horrific. “After getting to the clinic and having a rape kit performed…I was locked in a container with no food, no way to call my parents, and was placed under armed guard by Halliburton.” Jones claims to have been told to get over it.”

It was only when a sympathetic guard let her use a cell phone to call her father that agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad came to Halliburton’s Camp Hope and brought her home.

Even worse?
Halliburton seems to be exploiting a legal loophole that allows the attackers to remain unpunished. For the last two years, Jones has been asking the US government to hold the perpetrators accountable.

According to Nita Chaudhary of moveon.org, “The men who raped her may never be brought to justice because Halliburton and other contractors in Iraq aren’t subject to US or Iraqi laws. They can’t be tried for a crime in any court”.

Chaudhary says, “Jamie’s attackers aren’t the only ones exploiting a legal loophole to get away with their violent crimes. Another female employee of Halliburton says she was raped by her co-workers in Iraq.”

This story is certainly politically charged, and while staying neutral, I think it’s safe (and fair) to call for stiffer, more thorough background checks — in fact, it’s unclear whether background checks were run on Jones’ perpetrators at all — to be run on employees being contracted in Iraq. The Blackwater incident (again, trying to remain neutral) may serve as another example that more discretion be used in selecting overseas contractors. If not for literal fault, then at least for liability’s sake.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.