A Friday in mid-August, outside the Portuguese city of Elvas. Several office workers are smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee next to a garage that performs body work and paint work (“all marques,” reads the sign) in an industrial park on Avenida de Europa.
They are telephone operators for Marktel and Covisian, multinational customer service contractors operating in Spain.
In this corner of Portugal, just 11km from the Spanish border town of Badajoz, thousands of Spanish phone inquiries are answered every day. Many customers are unaware that when they call a Spanish service provider for help, they are actually calling a third party and the person they are talking to may be located in Portugal.
At a bar near the office, two ladies wearing aprons are nonchalantly serving the operators. Business is conducted in Spanish and Portuguese. Standing at the entrance are two women, a Spaniard and a Portuguese, and a man from Cuba. They are 26 and 27 years old, and have been working at the company for a little less than two years. For the young man, “It was his first job after leaving Cuba.” The three are said to be living in Badajoz and working in Portugal. “But in the Spanish time zone, which is one hour ahead,” explains the Spanish girl. “What about your salary?” We ask: “The salary is Portuguese,” she laughed. “It’s much lower.”
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“Portugal has become a call center paradise,” says Jesús Díaz, 30, from Extremadura, Badajoz region. He has been working in Portugal (in his case Lisbon) for eight years, “always as a telephone operator.” He says this setup is convenient for businesses “because wages are lower and there are fewer protections.”
Portugal’s minimum wage rose to €820 on January 1. In Spain it is €1,050. More than €200 per month disappears in the 11km that separates Extremadura from Elvas. “Moreover, in Portugal, unlike in Spain, the profession of telephone operator does not exist, so there is no collective bargaining agreement,” adds Díaz.
The young Estremadorian found his first call center job “through word of mouth” in his hometown of Almendralejo. “For me it was more convenient to go to Lisbon than to Madrid.” He said some of his friends started going to Portugal thanks to offers they saw on recruitment site Infojobs. “They asked you to speak only Spanish. They will interview you in Badajoz or online and then send you there.” Over the past eight years, Díaz has secured various customer service deals, including Netflix and Vodafone. “It’s a little bit of everything,” he says. “Some of us work at Microsoft, Orange…”
Major players in this lucrative “contact center” sector include France’s Teleperformance and Sitel, and Spain’s Konecta and Marktel. In Portugal, companies hire foreign workers to speak and speak their native language. “There are thousands of Spanish workers here (Lisbon) now,” says Díaz.
Díaz works for Teleperformance, Portugal’s third-largest private employer, with 11 centers in Lisbon alone and 14,500 employees. “There are departments from every country, and they centralized us here,” says Díaz. The “Work with us” section of the Teleperformance Portuguese website currently has job offers for Ukrainians, Greeks, Turks and Italians. Díaz is perplexed. “How are Spain’s pension coffers not empty when we are paying contributions from abroad to work in Spanish companies?”
Living in Spain and working in Portugal
Jose Luis Duran, 40, commutes every morning across the border from Badajoz to Elvas, where he works for Portugal’s minimum wage. “I am temporarily living with my mother because I cannot afford an apartment,” he says. He usually travels with a colleague to save fuel. As a technician with a marketing education, he was unable to find a job after completing his course in Brussels. He has been working as a telephone operator for the past four months. “In the end, you take what you can get.”
For Durán, this is his fourth visit to the call center. He has worked at Marktel in Elvas, Vodafone and Teleperformance in Lisbon, and Netflix. He said the stress had taken a toll on his personal life. He calls up to 60 people a day, and says, “Sometimes it’s hard to talk on the phone.” When he comes home he doesn’t want to talk. I understand people get upset when they wait two months to talk to a technician. I know it’s not personal. But when you are insulted, told you are worthless, or worse, it ends up getting to you.”
Durán complains that in Badajoz, “the only jobs are in bars, shopping malls and civil servants.” Extremadura is the fastest declining population region in Spain. According to Statistics Korea, 14 people will lose their lives per day in 2024. “There’s nothing there. People are leaving,” sighed Durán. “We have been waiting 30 years for a high-speed train to Madrid and we will wait another 30 years for a highway from Badajoz to Cáceres.”
Wage freeze ‘apology’
Durán said he is proud of his job, but “we want it to be enough to live on.” He currently works at Marktel on a health-related assignment for a large insurance company. He emphasizes the importance of his work. Recently he helped a group of Spaniards seek medical help in Madagascar.
For the past two months, Durán has been the company’s trade union representative and is currently a member of the Portuguese Call Center Workers’ Union (STCC). He discovered abusive conditions for other Spanish workers within the union. “One time the company asked employees to take voluntary leave, but no one volunteered, so four of them were fired.”
Fellow union member Jesus agrees. “We have also heard many cases of people suffering from anxiety and mental illness.” He admits things have improved since his first job as a telephone operator in Portugal in 2016, when the salary was €560. In 2018, a strike broke out in Lisbon Connecta and “the situation improved a little.” Teleference workers also went on strike in February of this year and are currently negotiating. “The company resorted to deception to avoid applying wage increases and housing allowances,” he said. Instead of receiving minimum wage, employees effectively earn €760.
Low wages are further exacerbated by Portugal’s continually rising cost of living. Many of the Spaniards who work in Elvas live in Extremadura. In Lisbon, where average rents are over 1,700 euros, higher than those in Madrid and Berlin, some companies help employees find accommodation.
Lisbon is the 38th most expensive city in Europe for foreigners, with London, Copenhagen, Vienna and Paris leading the rankings, according to research by consulting firm Mercer.
Díaz says that when she worked at Konecta, the company helped her find housing. “They will keep us in slums and not cover our costs.” Today the situation at Teleperformance has improved. The company handles all the paperwork and a portion of your salary is paid directly toward your lodging expenses. “You can live in a very nice apartment with four people, like the one I live in now, but there are also people who live in 10- or 12-bed rooms with only one kitchen.”
“It’s enough to get by, but I’m 30 and the idea of moving in with my girlfriend and having children on a salary of around 700 euros is completely impossible.”
Díaz cites the example of a Spanish family where “the father and mother both came to Portugal to work as telephone operators and this is how they live.”
When asked about low wages, Teleperformance CEO Pedro Gomes told Portuguese news outlet Sapo that wages were €1,600, “higher than the national average.” “How would this average look like if you got the highest salary?” Diaz smiles.
“It’s very easy to move the service overseas because basically all we have to do is pick up the phone,” says Díaz. “In the past we mainly called it Latin America, but now we call it Portugal.” So offshore outsourcing continues. “Netflix recently closed down in Portugal and went to Casablanca, which is cheaper.”
Besides Portugal, customer service hotspots in Europe include Bulgaria, Ireland, Estonia and Cyprus.
The cheapest labor market in the EU is Bulgaria, where the minimum wage totals €460. “Behind the glamorous story of the ‘Balkan Silicon Valley’ there is a more complex reality,” wrote Voxeurop’s Hugo Dos Santos, explaining that in Bulgaria, the sector is made up of a large number of foreign companies that outsource. According to the AIBEST association, there will be at least 802 companies by 2023.
