SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : SNAPSHOT : The Labor Brokers: For a Price, There’s a Job Abroad--Maybe

Plaza Ferguson, a shady patch across from the U.S. Embassy in downtown Manila, could well be Plaza Job-Seekers.

Each day, about 200 young men and women gather in the little park, sitting on the concrete benches as they fill out forms, hoping to join 2 million other Filipinos who have already landed overseas jobs in 127 countries.

Many work through middlemen--outfits like Northwest Placement, a 10-year-old, privately run recruiting agency that offers better-paying jobs in the Middle East. Inside the agency’s cramped office, something approaching mayhem occurs daily. Applicants crowd around the counter as a few clerks shout instructions above the din, offering advice on how to properly complete more forms.

Alfred Rosacio, the firm’s managing director, stares blankly, his thick gold bracelet and huge diamond ring indicating his success as a recruiter.

He has just sent 150 nurses, dental technicians and hotel workers to Kuwait, he said, and hopes to deploy 1,000 Filipinos a year to help the Gulf sheikdom with postwar reconstruction. It’s just a small part of government plans to send up to 42,000 Filipinos to Kuwait in the next two years, or as many as worked there before the war.

Northwest acts as an agent for Middle East employers. The employers often send their own people to Manila to personally interview the job-seekers. But other times, Northwest is asked to do the selection.

At Northwest, an applicant pays 5,000 pesos ($181)--the maximum allowed by the Labor Department--when he is assured of a job. The money pays for a medical check, visas and government clearance fees.

Not every recruiting agency functions so professionally. In the Philippines and elsewhere, there are hundreds of fly-by-night operations that take the applicant’s money and disappear. South Korea, Egypt, Thailand, Pakistan and India are among the countries that attempt to license or otherwise regulate recruiting. Yet many agents still operate illegally.

Often, unlicensed agencies here go to the provinces to recruit jobless Filipinos easily taken in by the promise of big overseas salaries.

Filipinos have been known to sell their land, livestock and appliances to finance the placement fee. Sometimes they borrow it, even though the fees charged by some unlicensed agencies may range from 8,000 pesos ($290) to 60,000 pesos ($2,175). The per capita income in the Philippines is $650.

Thousands have brought tales of woe back to the Labor Department, including many who left the Philippines only to find their promised jobs in some distant land to be nonexistent. The department’s legal unit has six lawyers handling 300 to 400 fraud cases each month, senior lawyer Joel Estrada said.

Consider the case of Rene Prianes and Calixto Perega--cousins, both in their 20s, who were promised jobs as waiters in a Washington, D.C., hotel. The men paid about $2,000 apiece to a recruiter and were given letters that supposedly guaranteed their jobs. But when they arrived in the United States, they found that the written promise had expired. They were deported and blacklisted. Back home, they filed suit against the recruiter, only to find that the agency had gone out of business.

Fraud isn’t the only problem confronting overseas workers. Many also face mistreatment, contract violations, rape or mental illness. So common are such problems that a permanent Labor Department office at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport gets 2,000 requests for assistance each month.

“Every day, we have to go fetch a dead body, or someone’s gone insane or a worker is repatriated and penniless,” said Rose Khan, head of the assistance division.

Japan has been one of the biggest sources of problems. The Batis Center for Women, a support group set up to help abused Filipinas, said in a June report that nearly 20% of Filipino contract workers in Japan, mostly entertainers, do not have necessary visas and permits.

“Most of them were recruited by Filipino firms fronting for the dreaded Japanese mafia--the Yakuza--which controls the majority of the nightclubs employing Filipina entertainers,” according to the report. “Many of the entertainers who go to Japan to work as singers, dancers and musicians end up in white slavery rings run by the Yakuza.”

Thus many became prostitutes; some were raped or even murdered.

In spite of frequent media reports of Filipinas trapped in Japan, however, starry-eyed, poor, provincial, uneducated women have not stopped seeking jobs in strange lands that promise prosperity.