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It’s a Friday in mid-August on the outskirts of the Portuguese metropolis of Elvas. Subsequent to a storage that does bodywork and paint jobs (“all marques”, reads the signal) in an industrial park on the Avenida de Europa, a number of workplace employees are having a smoke and a espresso.
They’re phone operators from Marktel and Covisian, two multinational customer-service contractors working in Spain.
From this nook of Portugal, solely 11 km from Badajoz, a border city in Spain, 1000’s of Spanish phone enquiries are answered on daily basis. Many shoppers are unaware that after they ask for help from their Spanish service supplier, they’re truly calling a 3rd social gathering and their interlocutor could also be in Portugal.
In a bar close to the workplace, a few women in aprons are serving the operators indifferently. Enterprise is carried out in Spanish and Portuguese. On the entrance are two ladies, Spanish and Portuguese, and a person from Cuba. They’re 26 and 27 years outdated, and say they’ve been working within the firm for somewhat underneath two years. For the younger man, “it was my first job after leaving Cuba.” The three say that they stay in Badajoz and work in Portugal. “However within the Spanish time zone, which is one hour forward”, explains the Spanish lady. “And the wage?” we ask. “The wage is Portuguese”, she smiles. “A lot decrease.”
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“Portugal has turn into a call-centre paradise”, says Jesús Díaz, a 30-year-old from Extremadura, the area of Badajoz. He has been working in Portugal for eight years, Lisbon in his case, and “at all times as a phone operator”. He says that this setup is handy for corporations “as a result of the wages are low and the protections are few”.
The minimal wage in Portugal is €820, following a rise on 1 January. In Spain it’s €1,050. Greater than €200 monthly that vanishes within the 11 km that separate Extremadura from Elvas. “Furthermore, in Portugal, not like in Spain, the career of phone operator doesn’t exist and so there is no such thing as a collective bargaining settlement”, Díaz provides.
The younger Extremadorian discovered his first call-centre job “by phrase of mouth” in his hometown, Almendralejo. “For me it was extra handy to go to Lisbon than to Madrid.” He recounts that some associates began going to Portugal because of gives seen on the recruitment website Infojobs. “They requested that you just communicate Spanish and never a lot else. They might do an interview, both in Badajoz or on-line, after which ship you there.” During the last eight years, Díaz has labored on varied customer-service contracts, together with for Netflix and Vodafone. “There is a little bit of every thing”, he says. “A few of us work for Microsoft, for Orange…”
The large gamers on this profitable “contact centre” sector embody France’s Teleperformance and Sitel, and Spain’s Konecta and Marktel. In Portugal the businesses rent overseas employees to discipline calls from their dwelling international locations, talking of their native languages. “There are literally thousands of Spanish employees right here [in Lisbon] proper now”, says Díaz.
Díaz works for Teleperformance, which has 11 centres in Lisbon alone and is the third largest personal employer in Portugal, with a workforce of 14,500 folks. “There are departments from all international locations and so they have concentrated us right here”, says Díaz. Within the “Work with us” part of Teleperformance’s Portuguese web site, there are presently job gives for Ukrainians, Greeks, Turks and Italians, amongst others. Díaz is mystified: “How are the pension coffers in Spain not empty, provided that we’re paying contributions out of the country to work for Spanish corporations?”
Residing in Spain, working in Portugal
Each morning José Luis Durán, 40, commutes from Badajoz throughout the border to Elvas, the place he works for the Portuguese minimal wage. “I stay quickly with my mom as a result of I can not afford a flat”, he says. He normally makes the journey with a colleague, to save lots of on gas. With coaching in advertising and as a technician, he did not discover a job after following a course in Brussels. He has been working as a phone operator for the previous 4 months. “Ultimately you are taking what you will get.”
For Durán, that is his fourth time in a name centre. He has labored for Marktel in Elvas, for Vodafone and Teleperformance in Lisbon, in addition to for Netflix. He says that the stress has taken a toll on his personal life. He’s on the telephone with as much as 60 folks a day and “typically the calls are powerful”. When he will get dwelling he does not really feel like speaking. I perceive that persons are indignant after they’ve been ready two months to talk to a technician, I do know it isn’t private. However being insulted, being informed you are ineffective or worse, it does find yourself attending to you.”
Durán complains that in Badajoz “the one jobs are in bars, malls or as a civil servant”. Extremadura is the quickest depopulating area in Spain. It misplaced 14 folks per day in 2024 based on the nationwide statistics workplace. “There’s nothing there, persons are leaving”, sighs Durán. “We have been ready 30 years for the high-speed practice to Madrid and we are going to wait one other 30 for the motorway from Badajoz to Cáceres.”
The “subterfuge” of wage freezes
Durán says he’s happy with his job, “however we wish it to be sufficient to stay on”. He presently works for Marktel on a health-related mission for a big insurance coverage firm. He emphasises the significance of his work: lately, he assisted a bunch of Spaniards on the lookout for a hospital in Madagascar.
For the previous two months Durán has additionally been a trade-union delegate on the firm and is now a member of the Portuguese Commerce Union of Name Centre Staff (STCC). Contained in the union he has found the abusive conditions of different Spanish employees: “One time an organization requested its staff to take voluntary go away and since nobody volunteered, 4 of them had been fired.”
Jésus, a fellow union member, concurs: “We’ve additionally heard about many circumstances of individuals with anxiousness and psychological sickness.” He admits that situations have improved since his first time as a phone operator in Portugal, in 2016, when his wage was €560. In 2018 there was a strike at Konecta in Lisbon that “improved the scenario somewhat”. Teleperformance employees went on strike once more this February and at the moment are in negotiations. “The corporate has resorted to subterfuge so as to not apply a wage enhance and the housing allowance,” he says. As an alternative of receiving the minimal wage, the staff successfully earn €760.
Low wages are compounded by Portugal’s continually rising value of residing. Most of the Spaniards working in Elvas stay in Extremadura. In Lisbon, the place rents common greater than €1,700, greater than in Madrid and Berlin, some corporations assist their employees discover lodging.
In line with a examine by the consulting agency Mercer, Lisbon is the thirty eighth costliest metropolis in Europe for expats, in a rating led by London, Copenhagen, Vienna and Paris
Díaz recounts that when he labored at Konecta, the corporate helped him discover housing. “They might place us in slums and never cowl our bills.” As we speak, at Teleperformance, situations have improved: the corporate takes care of all paperwork and part of his wage goes on to pay for the lodging. “You possibly can find yourself in an excellent flat, just like the one I stay in now, with 4 folks, however there are those that stay in flats of ten or twelve with just one kitchen.”
“It is sufficient for me to get by, however I am 30 years outdated and the concept of transferring in with a girlfriend and having kids, with a wage of round €700, is simply out of the query.”
Díaz cites the case of Spanish households “the place each father and mom got here to Portugal to work as phone operators, and so they stay like this”.
Requested in regards to the low pay, Pedro Gomes, CEO of Teleperformance, stated in an interview with the Portuguese information outlet Sapo that its wages are “increased than the nation’s common”, at €1,600. “How will the very best salaries make this common look?” smiles Díaz.
“Mainly all we’ve got to do is decide up the telephone, so it is vitally straightforward to relocate the service overseas,” says Díaz. “Prior to now, folks had been primarily calling Latin America, whereas now they’re calling Portugal.” And so the offshoring continues. “Not too long ago Netflix closed up in Portugal and went to Casablanca, which is cheaper.”
Moreover Portugal, Europe’s customer-service hotspots are Bulgaria, Eire, Estonia and Cyprus.
The EU’s most cost-effective labour market is Bulgaria, with a minimal wage of €460 gross. “Behind the glamorous story of the ‘Balkan Silicon Valley’ lies a extra advanced actuality”, writes Hugo Dos Santos in Voxeurop, explaining that in Bulgaria the sector is made up of a lot of overseas corporations that outsource. No less than 802 corporations by 2023, based on the AIBEST affiliation.
👉 Unique article on El Confidencial
This reportage is a part of the Pulse undertaking.
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