SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : The Social Cost : Paychecks Sent Home May Not Cover Human Losses : About 2 million Filipinos are working abroad. The families left behind often struggle with drug abuse, rampant crime and broken homes.

Visions of overseas workers who come home loaded with new wealth, enriching not only their hometowns but the country as a whole, do not apply here.

For the most part, this south Manila barrio remains brutally poor despite the fact that hundreds of its sons and daughters have been among those Filipinos who found relatively high-paying jobs overseas during the last 15 years. In fact, evidence is mixed at best that participation in the global labor market has benefited Bagong Tanyag much at all.

There are probably more brick walls among the wood and cardboard in the 9,000 squatter homes than there might have been otherwise. There are more television antennas and refrigerators.

But the human costs of delinquent children, drug abuse, rampant crime and broken homes are just as obvious. And poverty and unemployment remain crucial problems for those left behind.

Bagong Tanyag is representative of overseas workers’ villages all over the Philippines. About 2 million Filipinos work abroad as contract laborers. That’s 1.2% of the total population of 60 million--one of the highest rates among developing countries in Asia. Mostly they work as seamen, carpenters, masons, mechanics or maids.

Eighty percent of the families of Bagong Tanyag have members who have gone overseas to work, said Susan Merced, a homemaker who spends her spare time working for the government-sponsored Congress of Overseas Workers. Currently, she’s trying to persuade men and women who lost their Mideast jobs during the Gulf crisis to sell dried meat and embroider pillows for a livelihood.

Merced’s family has experienced both the good and the bad of international contract labor. Seven of the 12 siblings in her family are contract workers, and her husband, Julito, 47, spent six years in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, as a driver.

Her brother-in-law, Angel Vinarao, 41, was cheated by a fake recruiter. He signed up for a job as a security guard in Bahrain, putting up 10,000 pesos ($362), or the equivalent of a year’s earnings for a laborer in the Philippines, to finance his application. The recruiter disappeared with the money, which Susan Merced had raised for him by pawning her gold jewelry.

Vinarao’s wife, Maria, 38, came home from Abu Dhabi last August--malnourished, battered and her shoulder dislocated. She said she was not paid at all for the first six months and that the wife of her Iraqi employer would beat her for talking to a Filipino friend. “I had to carry pails of water up five stories even when I was sick,” Maria Vinarao said.

The drug problem among migrant workers’ children left at home is “very terrible,” commented Veronica Alvarez, another Bagong Tanyag resident. One of Merced’s nephews is in jail on drug and murder charges, and the community activist estimated that 45% of youngsters here have been involved in robberies or are addicted.

The village success story is Vivian Aloyan, 37, whose husband worked in Jidda for six years as a mechanic. “Vivian has complete appliances--television, stereo, fridge, electric fan,” said Zenaida Cos, the community kindergarten teacher and wife of another migrant worker, referring to the accepted barometer of advancement in this hardscrabble village.

Others use the remittances for a kind of “brain gain,” to send children to school who otherwise couldn’t afford it. But mostly, said Susan Merced, “people who were successful and save a lot of money, they move out of Bagong Tanyag to buy land elsewhere.” The village is left with little and relies on government help to cushion the eventual return of its overseas workers.

Other communities suffer similar problems. A preliminary government study of four municipalities south of Manila concluded that while migrant labor may provide economic benefits to individual families, it fails to provide social mobility to the workers.

“Workers think they have acquired a new social status when they return home. Actual data do not support that,” maintained Estrella Dulce, head of the regional Labor Department office.

Many returned workers find themselves in a vicious cycle, Dulce said. “When they come back they have no jobs. They need help again. They have no savings. A two-year contract would be enough just to pay off the debts they incurred to get their job in the first place.”

At home some become misfits. Dulce cited the case of one worker who committed suicide when he returned to find that his wife was living with another man. “They just want to go off again to another job, thinking that working abroad is the solution,” Dulce said of the workers.

“The majority of these psychological problems outweigh the economic benefits,” Dulce concluded. “Is the Philippines better off today with remittances?” she asked rhetorically. “I don’t think so.”

How much the government benefits from overseas labor is also debatable. The government still has no system in place to collect taxes from many contract workers. And most do not send money home through the official banking system, preferring an informal door-to-door courier network that keeps the money untraceable and untaxable.

Filipinos remitted only $1.26 billion, or a maximum of 40% of their estimated 1990 earnings, through the banking system. The International Labor Office and the Philippine government estimate that Filipinos’ actual overseas earnings were $3 billion to $5 billion, making them the country’s biggest single source of foreign currency.

Overseas workers prefer to send money to their families through private money couriers, who guarantee delivery in as little as 24 hours compared to anywhere from five days to two weeks for a bank transfer.

“They want (their money delivered) at a particular place, at a particular time, on a particular day. They don’t want their neighbors to know,” said Maximo Tuazon, a vice president in the House of David, a recruiting agency also involved in the money courier business.

The House of David operates out of a dingy office up a flight of rickety stairs in Manila’s tourist belt. Remittance orders are sent by computers, which are housed in a special room that a prominent notice declares off limits to visitors. The firm has a fleet of motorcycles, on which its couriers roar off each day carrying bags of cash for families in Manila and central Luzon.

Competition is getting so intense that some courier agencies provide other personalized services. They deliver birthday greetings, flowers and even roast pigs for special occasions.

Marianito Roque, manager of the Labor Department’s remittance unit, said the couriers have become part of the Philippines’ black-market trade. They maintain a large peso fund in Manila to pay the families of overseas workers but keep the foreign currency they actually collect from those workers in Hong Kong or Singapore bank accounts. This foreign currency is sold at a premium to Philippine companies that need it to buy imported goods.

At least one bank has decided to compete with the couriers. Rolando Rodriguez, vice president of Philippine Commercial International Bank, said the bank has introduced a new service that allows Filipinos working overseas to order appliances through the bank, which are then delivered to their families in the Philippines.

Still, some argue that the billions of dollars in overseas remittances have brought little actual benefit to the Philippines.

“The Labor Trade,” a booklet published by a migrant workers support group, notes that little of the money sent back, even through official channels, winds up financing new factories or businesses that might mean more jobs at home for the next generation of Filipinos.

“It is a myth that remittances lead to domestic capital formation,” the booklet concludes. “It is also false that labor export has solved the problem of unemployment.”

Taking Care of the Folks Back Home

Where does money earned on foreign soil get sent? Here are the 10 countries receiving the most foreign-earned remittances:

Amount Sent Home (in millions of U.S. dollars) Yugoslavia: $6,290 Egypt: $4,254 Portugal: $3,379 Turkey: $3,040 India: $2,650 Pakistan: $1,902 Spain: $1,425 Greece: $1,350 Morocco: $1,325 Italy: $1,227

SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Report 1991

Note: Data is for 1989 and may not include a significant amount of unreported remittances.