Less Than Two Euros an Hour: How Kenyan Electricians Building America's Milan Consulate Became a Wage-Theft Case

For a group of Kenyan electricians, the offer must have read like a promotion. They had already wired American diplomatic buildings in Nairobi, learning the exacting standards that come with secure government work. Now a US-contracted firm wanted them in Italy, on the construction of a brand-new United States Consulate in Milan, with employment letters quoting annual salaries north of €25,000 — close to $29,000. For a tradesman from Kenya, that is a life-changing number, the kind that builds a house at home and educates children.

What several of those workers say they actually earned, once the job was underway, was less than €2 an hour. That gap — between the figure on the letterhead and the money in the envelope — is now at the centre of a criminal investigation by prosecutors in Milan, and it has pulled the United States government, an Alabama construction company and a quiet corner of the Kenyan diaspora into the same uncomfortable story.

A Promise Made in Nairobi

The recruitment pipeline that carried these men to northern Italy ran through their previous work on US diplomatic projects in Kenya. According to accounts they gave investigators, they were sought out precisely because they already knew the security-sensitive demands of American government sites. The letters they signed, two of them on the contractor's own stationery, promised more than €25,000 a year.

Those promises matter legally. They are not vague verbal assurances but written terms, the documentary backbone of a wage-theft case. When workers later compared the contracts in their pockets to the deposits in their accounts, the discrepancy was not a rounding error. It was, they allege, the entire difference between a fair European wage and exploitation.

The Compound in Milan

The building at the heart of the dispute is a secure diplomatic compound, the new home of the US Consulate in Milan. The work sits under a contract worth roughly $210 million, awarded in 2022 by the US State Department to Caddell Construction, a firm based in Montgomery, Alabama; the wider project has been valued in some reports at around $350 million. Caddell is an established builder of American embassies and consulates around the world, the kind of company whose entire business depends on meeting Washington's standards.

Diplomatic construction is, by design, hard to see into. Sites are secured, subcontracting chains are layered, and the people doing the physical labour are often migrants far from home and far from any union hall. Italian authorities say that opacity is part of what allowed the alleged abuses to take root and persist on the Milan project.

When the Numbers Did Not Add Up

The workers' core complaint is not simply that they were paid little, but how the shortfall was engineered. According to their testimony, deductions for food, transport and shared accommodation were stacked on top of one another until take-home pay collapsed to under €2 an hour. They described shifts of about 12 hours, six days a week, on a job that was supposed to pay a salaried European wage.

When some of them questioned management, they say they were not met with explanations but with threats — of dismissal, and in some cases of deportation. For a migrant worker whose right to remain in Italy is tied to the very job he is complaining about, that threat is uniquely silencing. It is one reason exploitation on sites like this can run for months before anyone outside hears about it.

The workers under investigation came not only from Kenya but also from India and Egypt — a reminder that this is a story about global migrant labour as much as about any single nationality. But it was Kenyan electricians, several of them, who provided the contracts, payslips and first-hand testimony that gave prosecutors something concrete to work with.

The Investigation Widens

The inquiry did not begin this month. Concerns about labour practices on the Milan site emerged in 2024, prompting the Carabinieri and Milan prosecutors to open an investigation into allegations of abusive subcontracting and the underpayment of migrant workers. It escalated sharply in May 2026, when prosecutors formally placed Caddell's Italian subsidiary under investigation.

In June 2026, a Milan court upheld emergency measures placing the company's local branch under judicial supervision and appointing an administrator to oversee compliance with Italian labour law. The court's language was pointed: the alleged abuses, it suggested, looked systemic rather than like a handful of isolated incidents. Authorities also arrested the company's Italian operations manager — detained at an airport as he attempted to leave the country — along with a site supervisor accused of overseeing the practices now under scrutiny.

Much of the public detail traces back to reporting by The Associated Press, which interviewed five former employees and reviewed their employment letters and pay stubs. Two of those workers produced letters on Caddell stationery, signed by a company representative, promising the salaries they say never materialised.

What Washington Says

The case is awkward for the United States precisely because the building is American. The State Department has said it is investigating the allegations raised by prosecutors and that US law enforcement is cooperating with Italian authorities. "The U.S. government does not tolerate labor exploitation," the department said, language echoed by the contractor, which has pointed to a stated policy of zero tolerance towards labour abuses and said it is cooperating with the inquiry.

Those statements will be tested against the documents now in prosecutors' hands. The broader question the case raises — how a government that demands the highest security standards for its overseas buildings polices the wages of the people who physically build them — has no easy answer. Complex contracting arrangements, layers of subcontractors and a workforce drawn from across the developing world make labour conditions on diplomatic sites genuinely difficult to monitor, even with the best intentions.

Why the Diaspora Is Watching

For the Kenyan diaspora, this is not an abstract labour-law dispute. It is a familiar shape: the promise made at home, the journey abroad, the slow discovery that the contract and the reality do not match. Kenyans have lived versions of this story in the Gulf, in domestic work, in care homes and on building sites across several continents. What makes the Milan case different is that the workers had documents, kept them, and handed them to investigators in a jurisdiction willing to act.

That is also what makes it potentially important. If Italian prosecutors press the case to a conclusion, it could establish that even on a high-security American project, written promises to migrant electricians carry legal weight — and that the men who wired the lights in a US consulate cannot simply be left in the dark about their own pay. For now, the Kenyan workers at the centre of the investigation have done the one thing that exploitation depends on people being too frightened to do. They spoke, on the record, with the paperwork to prove it.