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 each day. Many shoppers are unaware that once 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 performed 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 They’re 26 and 27 years outdated, and say they’ve been working within the firm for a bit beneath two years. For the younger man, “it was my first job after leaving Cuba.” The three say that they dwell in Badajoz and work in Portugal. “However within the Spanish time zone, which is one hour forward”, explains the Spanish woman. “And the wage?” we ask. “The wage is Portuguese”, she smiles. “A lot decrease.”
Attention-grabbing article?
It was made potential by Voxeurop’s neighborhood. Excessive-quality reporting and translation comes at a value. To proceed producing unbiased journalism, we’d like your help.
“Portugal has grow to be 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 firms “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, in contrast to in Spain, the career of phone operator doesn’t exist and so there isn’t any 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 pals began going to Portugal due to affords 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.” Over the past eight years, Díaz has labored on varied customer-service contracts, together with for Netflix and Vodafone. “There is a little bit of every little thing”, he says. “A few of us work for Microsoft, for Orange…”
The massive gamers on this profitable “contact centre” sector embrace France’s Teleperformance and Sitel, and Spain’s Konecta and Marktel. In Portugal the businesses rent international employees to discipline calls from their residence 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 non-public employer in Portugal, with a workforce of 14,500 individuals. “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 at the moment job affords for Ukrainians, Greeks, Turks and Italians, amongst others. Díaz is mystified: “How are the pension coffers in Spain not empty, on condition that we’re paying contributions abroad to work for Spanish firms?”
Dwelling 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 dwell briefly 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 gasoline. With coaching in advertising and marketing and as a technician, he didn’t discover a job after following a course in Brussels. He has been working as a phone operator for the previous 4 months. “Ultimately you’re 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 non-public life. He’s on the telephone with as much as 60 individuals a day and “generally the calls are powerful”. When he will get residence he would not really feel like speaking. I perceive that persons are indignant once they’ve been ready two months to talk to a technician, I do know it isn’t private. However being insulted, being instructed 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 individuals per day in 2024 in line with the nationwide statistics workplace. “There may be nothing there, persons are leaving”, sighs Durán. “We have been ready 30 years for the high-speed prepare 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 dwell on”. He at the moment works for Marktel on a health-related mission for a big insurance coverage firm. He emphasises the significance of his work: not too long ago, he assisted a gaggle of Spaniards in search of 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 Employees (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 nervousness and psychological sickness.” He admits that circumstances 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 a bit”. 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 continuously rising price of residing. Lots of the Spaniards working in Elvas dwell in Extremadura. In Lisbon, the place rents common greater than €1,700, greater than in Madrid and Berlin, some firms assist their employees discover lodging.
In accordance with a research by the consulting agency Mercer, Lisbon is the thirty eighth most costly 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, circumstances have improved: the corporate takes care of all paperwork and part of his wage goes on to pay for the lodging. “You’ll be able to find yourself in an excellent flat, just like the one I dwell in now, with 4 individuals, however there are those that dwell 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 thought of shifting in with a girlfriend and having youngsters, 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 dwell like this”.
Requested concerning the low pay, Pedro Gomes, CEO of Teleperformance, stated in an interview with the Portuguese information outlet Sapo that its wages are “greater than the nation’s common”, at €1,600. “How will the best salaries make this common look?” smiles Díaz.
“Mainly all now we have to do is choose up the telephone, so it is rather straightforward to relocate the service overseas,” says Díaz. “Prior to now, individuals had been primarily calling Latin America, whereas now they’re calling Portugal.” And so the offshoring continues. “Just lately 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 complicated actuality”, writes Hugo Dos Santos in Voxeurop, explaining that in Bulgaria the sector is made up of a lot of international firms that outsource. At the least 802 firms by 2023, in line with the AIBEST affiliation.