December's bizarre climax comes when President Gloria Arroyo travels to Manila's Ninoy Aquino Airport to personally greet returning workers, who zoom through specially designated express lines for immigration and customs. After a welcome speech, Arroyo turns a big drum filled with tickets bearing the names of returnees and picks one from the batch to win a $2,000 grand prize.

It may look like a TV game show, but the Philippines has discovered the future of work. At any given time, about 10 percent of the country's 76.5 million population is hard at work - outside the country. During 2001, more than 800,000 people headed out on a commute that makes Rye-Grand Central seem like a milk run to the corner store. They went to Italy, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Singapore, and Uzbekistan. They went to Mongolia and Equatorial Guinea. Unlike Mexicans, who flock primarily to the United States, Filipinos traveled to 162 nations in all. Unlike Indians, who fill mostly tech and medical positions, Filipinos toil as domestic helpers, engineers, nurses, bricklayers, teachers, farmers, seafarers, stenographers, hairdressers, crane operators, cooks, and entertainers.

Having discovered its prowess as an outsourcer of labor, the Philippines is now pursuing the opportunity with fervor. Whereas the US has spent decades bemoaning the export of its jobs (to Mexico, to China), the Philippine government revels in the export of its people. Using technology to stay involved in family life back home, Filipino global commuters constitute one of the biggest sources of stability for the economy of a country perennially known as the Sick Man of Asia. Remittances, the money they electronically send back to their families, account for 8.2 percent of the nation's gross national product, stabilizing its peso, improving foreign currency reserves, shoring up consumption, and making more than a dent in the unemployment rate (now 11.1 percent). Last year, overseas Filipino workers sent home $6.2 billion. Indians sent home twice the amount - with 13 times the general population.

In short, this archipelago nation has succeeded at creating the world's most distributed economy, where the sources of production are so far-flung it boggles the mind. The machinery has gears in Andorra and the Seychelles and even Diego Garcia, wherever the heck that is. (Answer: a 17-square-mile atoll of coral and sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean, mostly a joint US-UK military base that's become a temporary work location for more than 1,000 Filipinos.) With advances in transportation and telecommunications barreling ahead, it's only a matter of time before the Philippine miracle becomes a standard for the new mobile global order, with skilled and unskilled workers commuting over multiple time zones to fill in labor gaps, zapping their wages homeward through space, reentering for a new assignment. Welcome to virtual nationhood.

In fact, this thriving "trade" has already made the Philippines the envy of the developing world. Officials from such poverty-plagued countries as Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nepal, and Vietnam have come to Manila to find out how they too can be prime producers of labor. The market for contract migrant work, they know, is growing: According to the International Monetary Fund, worldwide remittances totaled $2 billion in 1970; by 2000, the International Labor Organization set that figure at $73 billion. After a visit to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Indonesia's labor minister, Jacob Nuwa Wea, said, "We learned some things we can adopt at home - like mechanisms to protect overseas workers, how to prepare candidates to meet skill requirements, and how to license private employment agencies." Pakistan has patterned its overseas workers welfare fund after the one established by the Philippine government.

Flexible, industrious, and frequently skilled, Filipinos are finding their way into unexpected niche markets. Nurses trained in the Philippines, for instance, are more likely to end up working elsewhere. Hospital recruiters from Norway and the UK travel to Manila to hire them. Likewise, American school districts having trouble attracting new teachers are discovering ample supply in the Philippines. Recruiters hop on a plane to Manila, where, in crowded hotel conference rooms, they handpick certified teachers, who are given crash courses in Georgia history or California politics before they arrive on US soil.

Signs of this future already abound. You see them mobbing Hong Kong's Statue Square any Sunday afternoon - young Philippine domestic workers who celebrate their day off together: Hong Kong is a temporary home to 200,000 Filipinos. You see signs in the Dubai airport, Filipinos napping on benches between connections to various Persian Gulf destinations: They have been a major source of labor - both white and blue collar - in the Middle East since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. You see their mark on ships and in ports everywhere: At least 25 percent of the world's seafarers are Filipinos, and the majority of cruise waiters, too.

"It's an industry," admits Patricia Santo Tomas, the Philippine secretary of labor and employment. "It's not politically correct to say you're exporting people, but it's part of globalization, and I like to think that countries like ours, rich in human resources, have that to contribute to the rest of the world."

Fifty-three-year-old Vidasto Lantaca is wearing thick glasses, his hair a mess. He paces barefoot, holding an unlit cigarette, in his mother-in-law's tiny house in Barangalo Hulo, an overcrowded neighborhood in Manila's Mandaluyong City served by the Parish of Our Lady of the Abandoned. A college-educated mechanical engineer and the father of two sons, ages 10 and 13, Lantaca has been unemployed for three years. His wife, Percy, a nurse, worked on and off as a baby-sitter overseas until her age prevented her from getting another contract. When she came back to stay, she began work as a midwife, supporting her family on barely more than $2,100 a year. But the Lantacas' lives are about to change.

The perennial Sick Man of Asia now has a borderless business plan: "It's not politically correct to say you're exporting people, but it's part of globalization."

In nine days, Vidasto will make his way through Metro Manila to Ninoy Aquino Airport, where he'll depart for the Middle East. Having scrounged up a job placement fee - he borrowed $1,000 from a friend and took out a loan of $400 from his recruiter - he'll head for Dubai to work as a quality control manager for a construction company. His monthly paycheck of $1,400 will help cover food and schooling, and might even enable the family to save.

This isn't Vidasto's first job overseas. He's been a Philippine global temp before. He worked for six years as a construction supervisor in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, coming home for long-enough stints to meet Percy and marry her. He also did time as a mechanical engineer in Eritrea. But for the past three years, the family has been living on a mere $175 monthly while Vidasto searched out his next opportunity. That meant digging themselves into debt and giving up their TV to pay for his physical - but this job in Dubai will ultimately get the Lantacas' lives on track again.

In his new post, Vidasto will oversee the maintenance and operation of machinery, like cement mixers, for National Ready Mix, a construction company owned by the conglomerate Lootah Group. He'll be responsible for assigning jobs to about 40 equipment handlers and for ordering spare parts. When he arrives in the United Arab Emirates, he'll be met by a company representative, shown around, and settled into his own private room. Along with his salary, the firm will pay for his food and housing. He'll communicate with Percy and the kids via cell phone - perhaps the company will throw in some minutes - and within a few months, he'll deposit thousands of dollars into the family bank account.

What sets the Philippines apart from other countries whose legions also spill over their borders into wealthier lands (200,000 Malaysians commute daily to Singapore, for instance; some 200,000 Thai nationals, or about a third of a percent, leave home to work elsewhere each year) is that the federal government here is avidly encouraging the flow. In an example of socioeconomic engineering on an unprecedented scale, the Philippine leadership is embracing its role as temp agency to the world and structuring a political "business plan" accordingly. Although the ratio of remittances to GNP in nations like El Salvador and Cape Verde tops that of the Philippines, no other government maintains so sprawling a network of workers with as strict a hand.

The government official responsible for all this is labor secretary Santo Tomas, whose office is located on the seventh floor of a centuries-old building in Manila's oldest section. She is in charge of local and overseas employment; these days, for instance, her department is busily trying to fill demand for health care workers in developed nations where populations are aging. Santo Thomas also helps protect employees once they're relocated. Under her purview, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, funded by both employer and worker contributions, maintains a network of 27 worldwide and 14 regional offices to intervene when problems arise. It was the OWWA that was responsible for moving 30,000 Filipino workers to safety during the Gulf War.

Perhaps most important, Santo Tomas and her staff regulate the hundreds of recruiters who broker close to a million job placements each year. In 1974, Ferdinand Marcos created a mechanism for managing overseas workers on a government-to-government basis, but the phenomenon grew so quickly and became so unwieldy that four years later the government handed the business over to the private sector, choosing instead to provide regulation and oversight. Today, there are 1,300 private recruiters on record at the government's labor registry. They are the link between foreign employers - who also must register with the government - and job-seekers. They populate the upper floors of two- and three-story buildings along Manila's jeepney-clogged roads, advertising "Worldwide Jobs!" and they make money by charging the hired employee a placement fee. For a licensee to recruit legitimately, Santo Tomas and her staff require $7,000 up front as a surety bond, to be kept in escrow, and a clean legal record. Thereafter, her office keeps a regular public file of a recruiter's status (Good Standing, Delisted, Forever Banned).

"When I was young," says the labor secretary, "the only people in this country who traveled were the rich. Now we've democratized travel. I have a niece in Italy, a nephew in Bern, another nephew in Brussels. I have nieces in Los Angeles and New Jersey. By becoming an exporter of labor, we have broadened our horizons."

Santo Tomas has the poise and unharried demeanor of a long-ago charm-school graduate or pleasant younger grandmother as she sits back on a sofa in her massive office. She is open enough to admit that she pays her housekeeper the typical sum of only $50 a month and is willing to write her cell phone number on her business card in the event of further questions.

Appointed to her post in 2001, she weaves a convincing case for promoting and protecting international labor. The minimum wage in Manila is $5.30 a day, compared with the average $15 a day earned abroad under contracts approved by the federal government. Working in Manila, nurses bring in $15,000 a year; in the US they earn an average of $47,000. By diligently remitting money home, Filipinos help their local banks, which not only make a profit on currency exchange but use the capital to finance trade or buy Philippine bonds. The billions of dollars in foreign currency deposits go a long way toward underwriting the country's own development.

Of course, in the grand scheme of the Philippines' future, providing temporary labor to the planet is itself supposed to be only temporary. If the governor of the nation's central bank, Rafael Buenaventura, has his way, each productive, dedicated overseas laborer will be an advertisement for doing business right there in the Philippines. Buenaventura envisions global companies choosing the Philippines for establishing new plants, corporate headquarters dotting his archipelago and a million mothers working minutes from home. The push to send workers out of the country will pay back in spades. "At this time," he says, "it is too late to be competitive in manufacturing. The biggest boon we have is trained manpower that speaks English; therefore, we could be an outsourcing center." He pauses. "But if ever we can get our act together, we'll be like Ireland, where you can bring back skilled workers. That doesn't bring in remittances, but it provides jobs and raises export earnings."

For now, though, it's hard to imagine the labor flow reversing. Many Filipinos actually find their host countries preferable to their homeland: Among the estimated 7 million overseas workers, more than 2 million have chosen to stay permanently, either getting amnesty or marrying into foreign citizenship.

I MISS YOU; DO YOUR HOMEWORK; SEND MONEY - 100 million cell phone text messages a day are why overseas Filipino workers and their families remain families.

The Philippines' unique three-sided history has made it an oddity within Asia, perfectly suited to supporting this distributed economy. Until about 3,000 years ago, the islands operated almost completely in isolation. Most people lived in small villages at the mouths of rivers, subsisting on fish and rice. With the growth of trade, however, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and Indonesian travelers imposed an Asian influence on the islands. In 1493, Spain and Portugal made the bilateral decision to divide up the unexplored portions of the globe, and by 1521, Ferdinand Magellan wound up in what is now Cebu. He was killed by islanders two months later, but that didn't stop the Spaniards from colonizing the 7,100-island country for more than 300 years. Then in 1898, when Spain lost out to the US in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines fell under America's authority, where it remained until the Japanese occupation in 1941. A major battleground in World War II, the nation was recaptured by the Allies in 1945 and granted independence the following year. Today, "Look Asian, think Spanish, act American" is a common refrain.

While Filipino fruit pickers began streaming into the US as early as the end of the 18th century, it wasn't until the 1950s that professional workers - dentists, engineers, nurses, and scholars - followed suit. Equipped with Christianity they'd inherited from the Spanish, as well as English they'd learned as a second language, they slowly began arriving on other shores, too. They became dancers and musicians in nearby Malaysia. They went to Nigeria and New Guinea as professors and bank tellers. In the 1970s, Middle Eastern nations in search of workers to sustain the exploding oil industry hired construction workers, excavators, and hotel and medical help. In the '80s and '90s, in nations like Italy, Filipinas began taking care of the home front, enabling local women to go to work. Meanwhile, cheap airfares and new telecommunications drove further migration.

Today, the sprawling Philippine population is held together with the newest forms of groupware. Foreign workers rely on a variety of Web services for not only staying in touch with their hometowns (one site, for instance, is dedicated to Filipinos from Cagayan Valley who work in Hawaii) but also creating communities in their new locales (say, Filipinos in Austria, and, yes, there's a site for Filipinos in Diego Garcia). Moreover, the country's residents send and receive more cell phone text messages than citizens of any other nation.

Take Victor Morillo Jr., a 21-year-old volunteer organizer for a group in Manila called Assembly of the Sons and Daughters of Filipino Workers. With his green T-shirt, red backpack, and baggy jeans, he looks the part of a college-age activist anywhere in the world. But Morillo's story is quintessentially Philippine. His mother is employed as a fabric cutter on the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain. "When I run out of food," he explains, pulling a Nokia phone from his pocket, "I send my mother a text message telling her I need money for bread." His mom deposits dinars in a Bahrain bank, and a few days later Morillo ambles over to an ATM and withdraws pesos.

Filipinos like Morillo send more than 100 million such missives daily. Each 160-character message costs 1 peso (2 US cents) within the Philippines and 10 pesos internationally, making this possibly the cheapest place on earth to get hooked on texting. And it's only the calling party who pays. A typical cell phone costs the equivalent of $50; most people buy prepaid cards that, for $6, cover the cost of 300 domestic messages. I MISS YOU; SEND MONEY; DO YOUR HOMEWORK - it's how OFWs and their families remain families. Rosaria Reyes, the Filipina domestic helper killed by a suicide bombing in Israel last year, transmitted a message to her son the night before her death: MATULOG KA NA. Go to sleep already.

Then there are videophones. In the mountain-ringed town of San Pablo about two hours south of Manila, in the coastal city of Batangas, in Pangasinan to the north, in Rome and in Hong Kong, a nongovernmental organization called Atikha and a domestic workers group called Balikabayani have jointly opened centers for emailing, instant messaging, and communicating by videophone. "On a typical Sunday, hundreds of people come through here," says Imelda Laguindam, a Balikabayani organizer. She shows off a low-ceilinged, two-room office down a back alley in central Hong Kong. One room houses three Samsung computers on a single table. The other contains a JVC videophone. Laguindam explains that domestic helpers spend HK$1 (13 US cents) per minute for the computers and HK$7 per minute for the videophone, communicating with family members who simultaneously congregate in one of the three counterpart offices in the Philippines. On Sundays, when banks in Hong Kong and Rome are closed but domestic helpers typically have their only day off, workers come to the Balikabayani offices - which maintain reserve bank accounts for the purpose - to wire money home.

Vidasto Lantaca has been working in Dubai for two weeks when he is called into the head office of National Ready Mix. Already things have not gone as planned. Instead of a private room, he's sharing one with two other men, and he's been on call 24 hours a day. Now his employers are presenting him with a new contract, one that reduces his monthly pay from 5,000 dirhams to 2,500 dirhams - the result, they say, of deducting the cost of his food, travel, and housing.

Lantaca, who had been assured by his recruiter that those expenses would be provided as part of the job, is exasperated. "It wasn't just me," he explains later. "All the Philippine workers were called in and told they had to sign new contracts."

"We were all called in and told we had to sign new contracts," says a worker who refused. The deal is made clear: Sign, or be sent back to the Philippines.

He refuses to accept the agreement. Four days later, the deal is made clear: If he doesn't sign, he'll be sent back to the Philippines.

Lantaca phones his wife. Percy urges him to sign. "We owe too much money now," she says, referring to the $1,400 placement fee they'd borrowed to get Vidasto the job. He has no choice, she says softly, he must stay in Dubai for the two years they planned.

The irony of Family Day in the Philippine malls is not just that shopping has been elevated to a government-sponsored welcome celebration, but that psychotherapy serves as a party favor. The great, heartbreaking cost of the Philippines' economy is the splintering of millions of families, and no amount of futuristic global economics can disguise this. In the best of circumstances, those families that welcome remittances - to pay for food, college, a television set, or tin rather than thatch for a roof - are suffering in the absence of one or both parents. Mothers who work overseas - 63 percent of OFWs are women - usually leave their own families in the hands of relatives or older siblings. (Stay-at-home fathers are still uncommon in the Philippines.) Spouses are often separated for most of their married lives. Children live with the emptiness of losing one or both parents to distant parts of the planet. Familial affection and guidance are reduced to a stream of 60-character memos. "The social costs of overseas work," says Rosalinda Baldoz of the government's labor registry, "are marital breakup and dropout children who get into drugs or crime."

It gets worse, though. Aside from separating families, the overseas employment system is also rife with corruption. According to Baldoz, last year the POEA received 2,000 recruitment violation cases for such infractions as overcharging, sneaking workers out with faked visas, and sending them to jobs that never materialized. Even licensed recruiters perpetrate a scam known as contract substitution - whereby a government-sanctioned agreement is later replaced by an unapproved one detailing a lower-paying job. Often a new contract, written in a foreign language, is forced on the employee once she's in hock for her fees and far away from home.

Employment brokers argue that the government's working-conditions requirements make competing for job placements impossible. Overseas employers, they say, can hire workers from places like Vietnam or Malaysia for less money and less hassle. But other government critics say the regulations are already too weak. "Licenses are issued to agencies without much background checking," says Jean Enriquez, deputy director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women's Asia Pacific office, "and when they are revoked, the POEA reissues them to the same people under a different name."

Straddling the divide between "competitive pricing" and humane treatment, the government insists that it is cracking down on wrongdoers. "I just had in here a group of people to whom I read the riot act," says labor secretary Patricia Santo Tomas, who is imposing new rules that limit placement fees to one month's salary and triple the amount in escrow required to become a registered recruiter. "I want to be sure that, if anything goes wrong, there's money I can garnish so I can repatriate the person and pay back his salary."

Nevertheless, at the employment agency's headquarters, a semicircular, six-story building, a sign reads BEWARE OF FIXERS. This is the most energized spot in Metro Manila - not a disco, not a cockfight, but offices where aspiring OFWs fill out forms. Here, tales of ill-fated experiences abound. "She looked like a little girl," recalls Leah Carissa A. Yogyog, a media specialist with the workers welfare office. She's referring to a 22-year-old from Cagayan de Oro who was found by immigration bureaucrats at Ninoy Aquino Airport bruised, bleeding, and burned. She'd been a domestic helper in Singapore for six months, for which she was paid a total of $20, allowed to eat once a day, and beaten by her employer - who eventually got her a ticket home. "I once saw a woman whose ear was burned," Yogyog continues, "and one who'd been doused with hot water."

Of all the exploitation bred by the global labor trade, the most heinous is the abuse of women trapped in prostitution. Typically, victims come from the Philippine provinces. They are promised jobs by relatives or friends who represent a recruiter. They're told, for instance, they will get positions as cashiers or nightclub entertainers in Japan or Korea. Instead they might wind up in Malaysia or Nigeria, working the streets for a fraction of the wage they were promised.

Lantaca works for four more weeks in Dubai when he is once again called into the head office. This time he's told he will be sent back to the Philippines - that the company doesn't have enough work for him and that he isn't a good enough worker anyway. Two other Filipinos are told the same thing.

For the entire six weeks, Lantaca is paid $700. Of that, $420 goes to the recruiting agency to cover his fees and $280 is taken by his employer in exchange for food, transportation, and housing. Before he leaves Dubai, a friend gives him $135 to buy gifts for his family; he thinks about buying chocolates but figures his wife will be happier with the cash. In Manila, she pays for his taxi from the airport.

But Lantaca's story doesn't stop there. Right away, he's planning to set off again, to temp for a salary he can mostly send home. First, however, he returns to his government-licensed recruiter, seeking redress for his failed Dubai venture. After a few delays, he gets it. The recruiter will repay Lantaca $800 of his remaining $900 in placement fees, retaining $100 for paperwork.

So now he occupies himself around his two-story cement home, fixing some cabinets, spending time with the kids, plotting his future: Where to? Kuwait? Sudan? Saudi Arabia?

Contributing writer David Diamond (ddiamond@well.com) wrote about trucking logistics in Wired 9.12.

Copyright © 1993-2004 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.