Short answer. Because the bond is the fund a wronged applicant can actually reach. Article 31 requires every applicant for a licence or authority to post cash and surety bonds set by the Secretary of Labor, securing compliance with recruitment rules and with the terms and conditions of employment that were promised.
What the law says
All applicants for license or authority shall post such cash and surety bonds as determined by the Secretary of Labor to guarantee compliance with prescribed recruitment procedures, rules and regulations, and terms and conditions of employment as may be appropriate.
Labor Code, Article 31 — Bonds Posted By Recruiters. Read the full provision →
What the bond is actually securing
Read the last clause closely. The bond answers for compliance with prescribed recruitment procedures, rules and regulations and, separately, for terms and conditions of employment. That second limb is the one workers rarely notice, and it is the wider of the two: it reaches past how you were recruited into what you were recruited into. A salary that turns out to be lower than the contract said, or conditions substituted after signing, are failures of the terms of employment, not merely of paperwork, and the bond is posted with that kind of failure in view.
Posted before the licence, not after the trouble
The article speaks of applicants for license or authority, so the bond is a condition of entry rather than a penalty imposed later. An agency has to put money at risk before it is allowed to recruit anyone at all. This is deliberate: by the time a recruitment goes wrong the agency may have closed its doors, changed its name, or simply stopped answering, and a remedy that depends on the agency still being solvent is no remedy. The bond exists so that something remains behind when the office does not.
Cash and surety are different things
The provision names both. A cash bond is money the agency itself puts up; a surety bond is an undertaking by a bonding company to answer for the agency up to a stated amount. The amounts are fixed by the Secretary of Labor rather than by the article, so they change, and anyone quoting you a figure from memory should be treated carefully. What matters to a worker is the structure: there is a pot, it was funded in advance, and a third party with its own money at stake has an interest in the agency behaving.
What this means if you have been wronged
It means a claim against a licensed agency is worth pursuing even when the agency looks empty, and it means the licence itself is worth verifying before you pay anything, because an unlicensed recruiter posted no bond and leaves nothing behind. Keep the documents that identify the agency as a licensed entity — the licence details, official receipts, the verified contract — because a bond answers for the licensee named on it, and establishing that you dealt with that licensee is the first thing anyone will ask you to show.