Strange reflection behavior in php Laravel 4

This seems like a fairly simple reflection problem, yet I can't figure it our. I use Laravel 4.2 on Debian with PHP 5.6.6-1.

Basicly what happens is that I want to spawn a new object from a class in a Laravel QueueHandler like so:

$className = 'MyClass';
$myobject = new $className ();

and this doesn't work. I tried everything I can possibly think of and have no clue where to look. This code doesn;t work while it should:

<?php
use Pronamic\Twinfield\Secure\Config;
use Pronamic\Twinfield\Customer\CustomerFactory;

class TwinfieldQueueHandler {
  private $twinfieldConfig = null;

...

try {
  $twinfieldFactoryClass = 'CustomerFactory';

  //returns 0
  echo strcmp('CustomerFactory', $twinfieldFactoryClass);

  //works
  $test0 = new CustomerFactory ($this->twinfieldConfig);

  //throws an exeption with message:  "Class CustomerFactory does not exist"
  $r = new ReflectionClass($twinfieldFactoryClass);
  $test1 = $r->newInstanceArgs($this->twinfieldConfig);

  //gives error PHP Fatal error:  Class 'CustomerFactory' not found in {file} on line {line}
  $test2 = new $twinfieldFactoryClass ($this->twinfieldConfig);

} catch (Exception $e) {
  Log::error($e->getMessage());
}

Has anyone got any pointers on where to look and how to debug this?