Operation Desert Jobs: Calls Pour In to Firms : Employment: Group Fischer of Newport logged 3,000 inquiries in three days from workers seeking information. Fluor Corp. installed a new phone line to handle the traffic.

On a shelf behind George Fischer’s desk is a recent Christmas card from a Saudi Arabian friend: It shows Santa Claus wearing a gas mask.

Fischer has friends all over the world, most with less macabre senses of humor. His contacts come from 40 years of gathering information for a newsletter about overseas work contracts.

Now job-seekers from seemingly everywhere want to be Fischer’s friend. They are seeking the help of his company, Group Fischer, to land high-paying jobs rebuilding Kuwait, devastated by the Persian Gulf War.

The Newport Beach-based firm logged 3,000 calls in one recent three-day period from workers wanting information on companies likely to win contracts repairing Kuwaiti airports, roads, hotels and the oil industry. The phones are so busy that Fischer has begun making personal calls from his car.

Companies whose names have appeared in newspaper stories about potential contracts also say they have been besieged by job applicants, many of them recently put out of work by the economic recession.

VTN Corp., a small Orange-based engineering firm, is refusing to take more resumes after 2,000 poured in over the past week.

“It’s been unbelievable, just unbelievable,” said Daniel Montano, VTN’s chairman and chief executive officer. “We’ve been getting everything from the qualified people we want to calls from farmhands in the Carolinas. There’s a lot of pain out there now.”

The firm, which has no contracts yet, has also fielded calls from suppliers who want to sell everything from pita bread to helicopters. Tammie Graff, a receptionist for VTN, said she has taken so many calls that “my husband said I was actually giving out the company’s address in my dreams.”

Fluor Corp., the nation’s largest heavy construction firm, has installed a new telephone line to handle the calls. The Irvine-based company has confirmed that it is negotiating with the Kuwaiti government for reconstruction work.

Construction giant Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco has signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to manage the rehabilitation of the Kuwaiti oil fields and award contracts to other companies. News of the tentative contract spurred thousands of calls from job-seekers.

Bechtel set up a special phone line last Wednesday to handle calls about Kuwait, said Mike Kidder, a Bechtel spokesman. He said one day the company received more than 5,000 calls, the most the company ever remembers. Already, Bechtel has begun hiring British engineers through its London office, Fischer said.

He estimates that the reconstruction of Kuwait will cost $100 billion, while other estimates have placed the figure lower. Working in Kuwait holds out the promise of high salaries--as much as $100,000 a year in some cases, much of it tax free.

Fischer estimates that Americans will fill about 4,000 to 6,000 jobs and says U.S. firms are likely to capture between 70% and 80% of the reconstruction work. But many firms will hire unskilled laborers from Kuwait or Southeast Asia, where people will work for as little as $300 a month, he said.

He hopes that the Kuwaiti government will demand that more American workers be hired. “It was the American people who won that war, not just the U.S. government, and certainly not corporate America,” Fischer said.

Two job-seekers who entered Fischer Group’s office Wednesday looking for jobs in heavy equipment operation or shipping were told that most of the jobs open to Americans will be in food service, finance, computers, project management and field design.

Group Fischer is not technically an employment agency, but subscribers can have their names and skills listed in a data bank that Fluor and Bechtel and other companies use at no charge. Subscriptions are $400 for the first year and $300 for each year after.

Fischer will not say how many subscribers there are for the semimonthly publication, the Fischer Report, which was started by his father in 1946 when companies were rebuilding in Germany and Japan.

The report is filled with predictions and said as early as Jan. 1 that Saddam Hussein would blow up the oil wells in Kuwait. Fischer’s latest opinion is that Saddam Hussein will lose control of his country.