Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Besides adhering to the terms of the Arab Boycott, the contract between the Saudis and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also committed the United States to pay for all military facilities the corps built in Saudi Arabia. The contract was negotiated by U.S.

Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Parker T. “Pete” Hart, who subsequently went on to hold a variety of senior posts at the State Department. In 1973, Hart was hired by Bechtel to serve as its representative to Saudi Arabia and North Africa.

190

THE ARAB BOYCOTI

basis of a recommendation by an ERDA staff economist named A.

Howard Smith, whom Bechtel had flown to San Francisco and wined and dined at company expense. The Star series also alleged that a Washington law firm employed by Bechtel had persuaded the National Science Foundation to take the unprecedented step of requiring a scholar whom it had commissioned to study coal-slurry technology to disclaim any NSF connection with the study, which was highly critical. The articles had caused an uproar in Washington and touched off a congressional investigation as to whether Bechtel had violated conflict-of-interest laws. Though the probe had found no criminality, it had raised serious questions about the ethics of Bechtel’s business practices and its ties to various federal agencies.

Nor was that the end of Bechtel’s woes. The company was also under attack from a number of its female and black employees. Groups of both had filed noisy lawsuits against the company, charging Bechtel with discrimination in hiring, pay and promotion practices.

The women’s suit, which had been joined by 6,400 female Bechtel employees-nearly 80 percent of the home office’s female work force

-alleged that Bechtel functioned “like a men’s club” where women served essentially as corporate handmaidens. By the plaintiff’s estimates, fewer than 10 percent of the company’s managerial and professional-level jobs were held by women, who received significantly smaller paychecks than their male counterparts. The women further complained that of the 4,000 women college graduates at Bechtel, nearly 75 percent were in low-paying secretarial, clerical.or technical jobs.

Similar allegations were made in a suit filed against Bechtel by 400

black employees, joined by another 600 blacks who had left the company. They charged that they too had been victims of discrimination, and also of harassment and, in some cases, physical ·abuse. Bechtel vociferously denied the charges, as it did those filed by the women, but the blacks found support from the NAACP, which made its lawyers available to press the suit. The NAACP also petitioned the governments of Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and other African nations in which Bechtel did business to take a stand against what NAACP officials termed the company’s “home office racism.”

W hile the suits made their way through the courts, Bechtel also Bechtel settled the sex-discrimination case in April 1979 by paying its s1.1ing female

employees $1.3 million. A year earlier, the company settled the racial-bias case by paying $700,000.

·

191

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

found itself being pilloried for work it was doing on three major projects: the $3 billion Alaska pipeline, where it was under attack from a consortium of environmentalists; the $1.6 billion Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART), where delays and assorted construction snafus had resulted in a $500 million lawsuit by the State of California, and the Washington, D.C., Metro, where local black leaders were complaining that Bechtel had hired only a handful of black workers in a city where 70 percent of the population was black.

The combination of these troubles had