5/16 November 29, 2009
International Women Human Rights Defender Day
Exerpted from: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/houppert
In April of 2008, KBR employee Dawn Leamon went public. A few months earlier, she had been raped and sexually assaulted by co-workers while deployed at Camp Harper, in Iraq, and after weeks of being pressured not to report the incident, forced to work alongside her attackers, and medically neglected, Leamon brought the story to a Houston attorney.
Leamon joined a slowly building chorus of female defense contractor employees who'd been raped or sexually assaulted by co-workers while in Iraq, to utter impunity on the part of their assailants. In response, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called a hearing to investigate why the Justice Department had not prosecuted any sexual assault allegations in Iraq since the going to war in the country.
When it turned out that defense contractors often required employees, as a condition of employment, to submit to binding private arbitration in disputes with the contractors (including allegations of sexual assault), instead of bringing complaints to public courts, and that the Department of Defense claimed they couldn't prosecute for this very reason (even though these clauses only prevented civil suits), Senator Ben Nelson, who called the hearing, offered a simple solution: "This might be something you want to require and include in your contracts--before you award them."
Freshman Sen. Al Franken took Nelson's suggestion seriously, and pushed through an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill that would prevent the Pentagon from doing business with contractors who force employees into binding arbitration over rape and sexual assault charges.
Franken's amendment ended up passing, 68-30. Here's a list of the Senators who voted against it: [limited to D12] Barrasso (R-WY); Enzi (R-WY); Thune (R-SD). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied against the amendment as well.
As far as I can tell, the bill awaits the appointment of Representatives to the conference committee.
ACT:
Express yourself to your Senator and Representatives about the amendment.
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." -- The Talmud