Utah employment expert says Iraqi jobs to boom

By Mike Gorrell

Despite the destabilizing efforts of anti-coalition terrorists and suicide bombers, a Utahn involved in rebuilding Iraq predicted Sunday the country's reconstruction is about to take off.
Centerville resident Robert Gross, a former Utah Department of Workforce Services executive director, returned home Saturday after spending the past four months helping the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority prepare Iraqi bureaucrats to put people back to work and handle other social-service needs when power is turned over to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.
"Job availability will really begin to take off in earnest now," said Gross, citing the $18.4 billion in supplemental funding that will be released to private contractors to reverse the destruction of the war and years of tyranny before that.
"It will emerge in the next 60-90 days in almost unbelievable fashion as contractors put the supplementary money to use on construction and reconstruction projects," he added. "With $12 billion for construction of schools, colleges, trade schools, oil facilities, electricity, infrastructure, roads, highways and buildings, there will be a huge demand for jobs in the construction trades."
When Gross went to Iraq in January as a senior adviser to the Iraqi ministry of labor and social affairs, he found he was dealing with an agency that was run by "thugs" and did little to help common Iraqis during the now-deposed administration of Saddam Hussein.
"Saddam used it as a ministry to assist corruption," Gross said, maintaining the Iraqi dictator filled its ranks with "government officials who, for one reason or another, didn't fit in where they were."

Within the complex that contained more than a dozen ministry buildings, Saddam also stashed thousands of scud missiles and launchers that went unused in the rapid U.S. military advance. But little else remained after Saddam's fall.
Gross said looters stripped the complex clean, down to bathroom faucets.
Starting from scratch physically and psychologically was difficult, given Iraq's lack of experience with a free-market economy. And, Gross acknowledged, the campaign to get Iraqi society back on its feet again has been undermined by terrorist attacks on Iraqis who cooperate with the American-led provisional authorities.
"Despite that, literally hundreds of Iraqis come to the [ministry] complex every day as translators or workers in some other capacity. They choose to because they believe in the need for jobs," Gross said, noting that two of his Iraqi colleagues were killed by terrorists for their cooperation, one in Fallujah, the other in Iraq's Kurdish region.
Nevertheless, he said, the ministry has opened four employment and vocation centers, started English-as-a-second-language classes and developed curricula for training in electricity, cement masonry, plumbing and other construction vocations.
Another two dozen centers are expected to open by the end of this month.
"Our eventual goal is 28 [centers] by June 30," Gross said. "We're likely to come close to that."
He said most of the Iraqis he has met are grateful American-led coalition forces had overturned Saddam but also are tired of the occupation. "Most of all they're sick and tired of the violence."
While Gross said he has not read much news coverage of the war in Iraq, he has been mystified by the negative nature of what he has seen.
"Many days we wondered what war [reporters] were talking about," he said. "Their stories often paint vastly different pictures of what we lived and experienced. It was much more negative than the facts would warrant."
Mistakes have been made in the American occupation, Gross said, particularly disbanding the Iraqi military and police forces early on.
"We've never found a war that hasn't been a learning experience. There's seldom a blueprint on how to conduct a war. This war is in that genre," he said. "We're learning from our mistakes and our successes keep getting better every day. That's what I don't see in the American media."

From: http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Jun/06072004/utah/173355.asp