Bulgaria: from tech heaven to call-centre hell

As in most other countries with a socialist past, the development of the Bulgarian economy since 1989 has been characterised by widespread de-industrialisation and the rise of the service sector, which now employs more than half of the country’s workforce – 57.66% in 2022.

The sector is driven by tourism, but also increasingly by information and communication technologies (ICTs). And while the departure of Russian tourists is fuelling worries for Black Sea resorts, ICTs are clearly on a roll. This is particularly true of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, where even the mayor Vassil Terziev (“We Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria”, centre right) comes from the tech world.

Elected in November 2023 as part of a pro-European anti-corruption coalition, Terziev is the founder of Telerik, a company that provides tools for developing software applications. In 2014, it was sold for a record $262.5 million to Progress Software Corporation, a US software company listed on NASDAQ.

Before entering politics (he has since left it), Terziev was involved in consultancy and investment in Bulgarian start-ups (through the Eleven Ventures investment fund and the San Francisco-based Bulgaria Innovation Hub), as well as in training (through the Telerik Academy Foundation).

Bulgaria’s ICT sector enjoys a positive image, fuelled by the success stories of some of its founders. Their careers seem to be the antithesis of the stereotype of the Bulgarian Homo Sovieticus: “Docile, unimaginative, incapable of taking initiative or communicating with customers”, as anthropologist Tsvetelina Hristova described him.

This contrast between the modernity of online tech-mediated business and a cumbersome state sector is also on full view in Bulgaria. There have been numerous initiatives  to digitise and modernise the public services since 2015. Over the past ten years or so, Sofia has become a city of contrasts, where gleaming Teslas parade through residential neighbourhoods where residents still heat their homes with firewood.

Some local start-ups have already made a name for themselves internationally, or at least in Europe. One of them is Payhawk, Bulgaria’s first “unicorn” (that is, an unlisted independent start-up valued at over a billion dollars). The country is becoming known in the worlds of deeptech (innovative new technologies), fintech (those involving finance) and artificial intelligence. With its 40,000 square metres on the edge of Mount Vitosha, the Sofia Tech Park is the first and largest site in the Balkans devoted solely to this  new economy. It is attracting substantial investment from private investors and the Bulgarian government, which sees it as an opportunity to directly create more than 15,000 jobs.

But behind the seductive story of the “Silicon Valley of Southeastern Europe” – as the US Department of Commerce has branded Bulgaria – hides a more complex reality. In practice, the sector is made up of a large number of foreign companies that practise outsourcing: 802 in total in 2023, according to the industry association AIBEST. These companies outsource all kinds of activities: production, administration, marketing, legal services, customer assistance and support.

The country remains the poorest in the EU, with a minimum monthly wage of just €460 gross, making it the cheapest labour market in Europe

The most representative of the sector are Hewlett-Packard, Akkodis and Atos. Among those specialising in customer support, Telus, Concentrix, Alorica and Sutherland have taken the lion’s share. You may well come across a Bulgarian call centre if you contact the customer services departments of Deutsche Telekom, Spotify, Hilton, North Face, Nike, Paramount+, Microsoft, Google, or one of the many French mutual health-insurance companies that have relocated their services to this small Balkan.

In all, at least 104,690 employees work full-time in outsourcing in Bulgaria. This is the figure put forward by AIBEST in a report dating from 2023. For many, their job is to respond to emails, messages and calls from consumers or professionals, or else to moderate content on social networks. The telephone call centres alone employ 11,831 people, according to Bulgaria’s National Institute of Statistics.

As one of Europe’s peripheral countries, Bulgaria is not exceptional. Portugal, Ireland, Estonia and Cyprus have also become prime destinations for outsourcing and customer services. In Bulgaria, this sector has been growing steadily since the 2010s. The country remains the poorest in the EU, with a minimum monthly wage of just €460 gross, making it the cheapest labour market in Europe. This figure should be set against the median Bulgarian salary, which is around €1,000 (rising to €1,400 in the capital).

These companies also benefit from a low tax rate (10%) and the country’s good language skills, which are explained by the fact that many Bulgarians have spent time abroad to study or work. Finally, the brutality of the economic transition of the 90s has left its mark on local attitudes to such an extent that the Bulgarian employees of multinationals are often content to accept low pay and poor conditions.

Employers’ organisations have also invested heavily in universities to create dedicated training courses, thus building a natural bridge between young graduates and the customer-service industry. According to Tsvetelina Hristova, they are advocating “that children should learn communication techniques from an early age, [so as to] be good service workers.”

An agreement between the Bulgarian University of Veliko Tarnovo and the Belgian company Euroccor goes even further, by setting up an on-campus call centre. Employees are subsequently recruited directly from the foreign-languages department there.

Devalued Bulgarians and impoverished Europeans

According to the work of anthropologists Tsvetelina Hristova and Christina Korkontzelou, the workforce of these companies is made up of four quite different but hard-to-quantify groups: young Bulgarians who have left university; workers undergoing professional retraining; returning emigrants; and foreigners.

The first category is recruited while studying or after leaving university. Qualified and malleable, this workforce is particularly valued. The second is the product of the collapse of the Bulgarian public sector, undermined by privatisation and endemic corruption. These are people trained in other occupations, such as language teachers, but whose salaries are so low that they are forced to work elsewhere (in 2022, the salary of an entry-level teacher was €723 gross).

Emigrants who have returned to Bulgaria are a sought-after category, representing a skilled workforce in terms of both qualifications and experience. Companies such as Telus have not hesitated to target this group with advertising campaigns. Such returnees can receive up to 5,000 levas (€2,500) in recruitment bonuses. Since the Covid-19 crisis and the acceleration of teleworking, some such Bulgarians now even have the luxury of working directly from their home village.

The foreigners working in this sector can be divided into two groups, which are also difficult to quantify.

The first, which is most visible in Bulgaria’s major cities, is made up of young and unskilled Europeans, often from peripheral and impoverished regions. In Bulgaria, these people are typically understood to form a sort of artificial extension of the “nomadic and expatriate elite” with a little more purchasing power than average, as Tsvetelina Hristova points out. They are recruited directly in their country of origin, via the usual job-search platforms (which include France Travail). Some of them have worked in several European countries in the same capacity.

Inside Bulgaria there are recruitment agencies dedicated entirely to this industry. They take advantage of the commissions on offer from major companies. Employees who co-opt friends may also receive such payments, which range from a few hundred euros to nearly €1,000, the equivalent of a month’s salary or more.

The second group comprises people from outside Europe, particularly from North Africa and the Middle East, who use their skills in French, English and Arabic. Such workers may use these jobs as a springboard to other careers that better match their qualifications and life goals, but also to enable access to wealthier countries in the eurozone. In 2023, around 23,000 non-EU nationals (a relatively small number) obtained work permits in Bulgaria, across all sectors and origins.

Conditions differ according to origin

Working conditions in these companies are characterised by a lack of personal contact and micro-management of the smallest details, particularly concerning working hours. Breaks are timed and employees have little control over their schedules, which change weekly or monthly. Naturally, the most sought-after jobs are those that do not involve night shifts or weekend work, and which have fixed working hours during the week. Most companies do not allow people to take holidays whenever they want, particularly in the summer, as such disruptions can undermine their competitiveness.

Remuneration, which generally ranges from €800 to €1,200 (net, based on a 40-hour week), are made up of wages and a host of benefits that the companies dangle before their employees as “bonuses”. These include payments for performance or punctuality, as well as discounts at shopping malls – where such companies are often located – and sports clubs.

The pay gap is one of the bones of contention between Bulgarian and European employees. Native foreign-language speakers are paid more than Bulgarians, regardless of their experience. And those languages do not have the same value, a situation that can only undermine solidarity between employees. Bulgarian and English are at the bottom of the scale, while Scandinavian languages generally earn their speakers the highest salaries.

The glaring absence of trade unions

The major trade-union confederations are absent from these companies, and hold no data either on the number of employees or on working conditions. “We don’t have any union members in these companies, and these employees don’t contact us, so we have no reason to have any data,” confesses one of the heads of Isturet, the research institute of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Bulgaria (CSIB). A direct descendant of the Central Council of Trade Unions (CCS) of the socialist era, this umbrella organisation is still housed in its former premises, a brutalist tower block in the centre of Sofia.

In reality, trade unions carry very little weight in the Bulgarian private sector, and the number of collective agreements is very limited, a situation spotlighted by Slavina Spasova, Director of the European Social Observatory, in Trade unions in the European Union (2023, European Trade Union Institute). The book’s co-ordinators, researchers Torsten Müller and Kurt Vandaele, also explain that “it is notoriously difficult to organise in these companies, and not just in Bulgaria. Many multinationals pursue anti-union strategies by trying to keep unions out of their workplaces”. For these authors, call centres are “an excellent example of strategies to avoid and dismantle trade unions, with surveillance technology being very useful in this context”.

Anthropologist Christina Koroukolou suggests an additional hypothesis: “Bulgarian trade unions may be afraid that these companies will leave the country and that employees will lose their jobs.”

Nevertheless, Slavina Spasova stresses that trade unions do have a real impact on Bulgarian society, even if social dialogue there is essentially bipartite, i.e. between the union confederations and the state. She stresses that current social realities are taken properly into account, with an important role played by Isturet, which she describes as “one of the most active trade-union research institutes in the EU”. In her view, the organisation has “played a crucial role in providing expertise on industrial and social policies”.

Similarly, Torsten Müller and Kurt Vandaele note that “Bulgarian trade unions have recently succeeded in organising previously non-unionised sectors, such as the ICT industry, which has a high proportion of young employees”. Yet it must be said that this is not the case of companies that outsource customer support. Indeed, the trade union set up by the CSIB for ICT employees no longer exists, and its only substitute is Bulgaria’s other trade-union confederation, CL Podkrepa, which is aimed more at tech employees (programmers, analysts, developers, etc.).

The Bulgarian employees of these companies talk of their distrust of the trade unions, which are still tainted by their affiliation to the authorities and to the Bulgarian Socialist Party, which in turn is the heir to the former Communist Party. More than their political colour, it is their possible instrumentalisation that seems to undermine their credibility in the customer-service sector. Yet the lack of an organisation that could stand up for workers, individually or collectively, is cruelly felt.

Solitary resistance and online dismissals

Forms of resistance within these companies often take the form of individual actions that might seem almost anecdotal. Foreign employees regularly resort to absenteeism (sick leave or other time off work), which is a great concern for middle managers, who constantly need to justify the profitability of their workforce to their superiors.

Employees may also choose to leave their job and move to another company, given the fast turnover of recruitment in Sofia, Varna and Plovdiv. In such places it is common for foreign native speakers to find a new job within a few days.

Finally, employees regularly share with colleagues tips and tricks for resisting the efforts of micro-managers to check up on them. These include using “mouse jiggler” applications to simulate mouse activity; tinkering with attendance data or clock-in times; and shortcuts for completing tasks more quickly. Another common ploy, which is more specific to Bulgaria, is to avoid work on the pretext that there was a power cut – a phenomenon which is still common outside the big cities.

But generally speaking, it seems very difficult for Bulgarian employees to push collectively for an improvement in their working conditions or pay.

Firstly, because they are paralysed by the fear of losing their jobs, or of being viewed unfavourably in an industry that they see as a credible alternative to the miserable wages on offer in other sectors. In Bulgaria, the conditions for accessing unemployment benefits are restrictive and the levels of remuneration low (60% of salary at most, after a minimum of 12 months on contract).

Moreover, the widespread use of remote working, favoured by the youngest employees, makes it almost impossible for colleagues to talk to each other. At online meetings it is managers who decide who speaks. They may also frame and surveil conversations on Slack, and install spy software to quantify employees’ computer usage. Dismissals are generally carried out online, with the employee’s microphone turned off.

In the end, the departure of these companies seems inevitable. Wages in Bulgaria are approaching European standards and AI is emerging as a credible replacement for the workers in these “bullshit jobs”, to use the terminology popularised by anthropologist David Graeber in his eponymous book.

With inflation, even the pay in this sector is not as good as it used to be. In March 2024, strikes took place in a number of call centres in Greece, in Athens, Thessaloniki, Chania and the Attica region. Their goal was a pay rise in line with galloping inflation in this country that neighbours Bulgaria.

In the near future, the challenge for Bulgaria will doubtless be to find a way of bouncing back after some of its workforce has been worn out in unskilled jobs that are of no use to local life. Since the 1990s, more than 1.5 million Bulgarians have left Bulgaria, and the country continues to have a terrible shortage of teachers, nurses and construction workers.