It is a Friday in mid-August on the outskirts of the Portuguese city of Elvas. Next to a garage that does bodywork and paint jobs (“all marques”, reads the sign) in an industrial park on the Avenida de Europa, several office workers are having a smoke and a coffee.
They are telephone operators from Marktel and Covisian, two multinational customer-service contractors operating in Spain.
From this corner of Portugal, only 11 km from Badajoz, a border town in Spain, thousands of Spanish telephone enquiries are answered every day. Many customers are unaware that when they ask for assistance from their Spanish service provider, they are actually calling a third party and their interlocutor may be in Portugal.
In a bar near the office, a couple of ladies in aprons are serving the operators indifferently. Business is conducted in Spanish and Portuguese. At the entrance are two women, Spanish and Portuguese, and a man from Cuba. They are 26 and 27 years old, and say they have been working in the company for a little under two years. For the young man, “it was my first job after leaving Cuba.” The three say that they live in Badajoz and work in Portugal. “But in the Spanish time zone, which is one hour ahead”, explains the Spanish girl. “And the salary?” we ask. “The salary is Portuguese”, she smiles. “Much lower.”
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“Portugal has become a call-centre paradise”, says Jesús Díaz, a 30-year-old from Extremadura, the region of Badajoz. He has been working in Portugal for eight years, Lisbon in his case, and “always as a telephone operator”. He says that this setup is convenient for companies “because the wages are low and the protections are few”.
The minimum wage in Portugal is €820, following an increase on 1 January. In Spain it is €1,050. More than €200 per month that vanishes in the 11 km that separate Extremadura from Elvas. “Moreover, in Portugal, unlike in Spain, the profession of telephone operator does not exist and so there is no collective bargaining agreement”, Díaz adds.
The young Extremadorian found his first call-centre job “by word of mouth” in his hometown, Almendralejo. “For me it was more convenient to go to Lisbon than to Madrid.” He recounts that some friends started going to Portugal thanks to offers seen on the recruitment site Infojobs. “They asked that you speak Spanish and not much else. They would do an interview, either in Badajoz or online, and then send you there.” Over the last eight years, Díaz has worked on various customer-service contracts, including for Netflix and Vodafone. “There’s a bit of everything”, he says. “Some of us work for Microsoft, for Orange…”
The big players in this lucrative “contact centre” sector include France’s Teleperformance and Sitel, and Spain’s Konecta and Marktel. In Portugal the companies hire foreign workers to field calls from their home countries, speaking in their native languages. “There are thousands of Spanish workers here [in Lisbon] right now”, says Díaz.
Díaz works for Teleperformance, which has 11 centres in Lisbon alone and is the third largest private employer in Portugal, with a workforce of 14,500 people. “There are departments from all countries and they have concentrated us here”, says Díaz. In the “Work with us” section of Teleperformance’s Portuguese website, there are currently job offers for Ukrainians, Greeks, Turks and Italians, among others. Díaz is mystified: “How are the pension coffers in Spain not empty, given that we are paying contributions in a foreign country to work for Spanish companies?”
Living in Spain, working in Portugal
Every morning José Luis Durán, 40, commutes from Badajoz across the border to Elvas, where he works for the Portuguese minimum wage. “I live temporarily with my mother because I cannot afford a flat”, he says. He usually makes the trip with a colleague, to save on fuel. With training in marketing and as a technician, he failed to find a job after following a 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 time in a call centre. He has worked for Marktel in Elvas, for Vodafone and Teleperformance in Lisbon, as well as for Netflix. He says that the stress has taken a toll on his private life. He is on the phone with up to 60 people a day and “sometimes the calls are tough”. When he gets home he doesn’t feel like talking. I understand that people are angry when they’ve been waiting two months to speak to a technician, I know it’s not personal. But being insulted, being told you’re useless or worse, it does end up getting to you.”
Durán complains that in Badajoz “the only jobs are in bars, malls or as a civil servant”. Extremadura is the fastest depopulating region in Spain. It lost 14 people per day in 2024 according to the national statistics office. “There is nothing there, people are leaving”, sighs Durán. “We’ve been waiting 30 years for the high-speed train to Madrid and we will wait another 30 for the motorway from Badajoz to Cáceres.”
The “subterfuge” of wage freezes
Durán says he is proud of his job, “but we want it to be enough to live on”. He currently works for Marktel on a health-related mission for a large insurance company. He emphasises the importance of his work: recently, he assisted a group of Spaniards looking for a hospital in Madagascar.
For the past two months Durán has also been a trade-union delegate at the company and is now a member of the Portuguese Trade Union of Call Centre Workers (STCC). Inside the union he has discovered the abusive situations of other Spanish workers: “One time a company asked its employees to take voluntary leave and since no one volunteered, four of them were fired.”
Jésus, a fellow union member, concurs: “We have also heard about many cases of people with anxiety and mental illness.” He admits that conditions have improved since his first time as a telephone operator in Portugal, in 2016, when his salary was €560. In 2018 there was a strike at Konecta in Lisbon that “improved the situation a little”. Teleperformance workers went on strike again this February and are now in negotiations. “The company has resorted to subterfuge in order not to apply a wage increase and the housing allowance,” he says. Instead of receiving the minimum wage, the employees effectively earn €760.
Low wages are compounded by Portugal’s constantly rising cost of living. Many of the Spaniards working in Elvas live in Extremadura. In Lisbon, where rents average more than €1,700, more than in Madrid and Berlin, some companies help their workers find accommodation.
According to a study by the consulting firm Mercer, Lisbon is the 38th most expensive city in Europe for expats, in a ranking led by London, Copenhagen, Vienna and Paris
Díaz recounts that when he worked at Konecta, the company helped him find housing. “They would place us in slums and not cover our expenses.” Today, at Teleperformance, conditions have improved: the company takes care of all paperwork and a part of his salary goes directly to pay for the accommodation. “You can end up in a very good flat, like the one I live in now, with four people, but there are those who live in flats of ten or twelve with only one kitchen.”
“It’s enough for me to get by, but I’m 30 years old and the idea of moving in with a girlfriend and having children, with a salary of around €700, is just out of the question.”
Díaz cites the case of Spanish families “where both father and mother came to Portugal to work as telephone operators, and they live like this”.
Asked about the low pay, Pedro Gomes, CEO of Teleperformance, said in an interview with the Portuguese news outlet Sapo that its wages are “higher than the country’s average”, at €1,600. “How will the highest salaries make this average look?” smiles Díaz.
“Basically all we have to do is pick up the phone, so it is very easy to relocate the service abroad,” says Díaz. “In the past, people were mainly calling Latin America, whereas now they are calling Portugal.” And so the offshoring continues. “Recently Netflix closed up in Portugal and went to Casablanca, which is cheaper.”
Besides Portugal, Europe’s customer-service hotspots are Bulgaria, Ireland, Estonia and Cyprus.
The EU’s cheapest labour market is Bulgaria, with a minimum wage of €460 gross. “Behind the glamorous story of the ‘Balkan Silicon Valley’ lies a more complex reality”, writes Hugo Dos Santos in Voxeurop, explaining that in Bulgaria the sector is made up of a large number of foreign companies that outsource. At least 802 companies by 2023, according to the AIBEST association.
👉 Original article on El Confidencial
This reportage is part of the Pulse project.
