For several weeks now, millions of workers across the world have still been working in their call-centres, taking, or even making calls to sell phone subscriptions or insurance policies...
Subcontractors working for customer service of trading multinationals (Teleperformance, Concentrix, Atento, Comdata, Sitel ou Majorel...) are still crammed in production platforms where sometimes one is taking over their colleague’s workstation without it having been cleaned with the right product and passing on headsets.

Everyday, workers from that field have to travel to work, with the risk of catching or transmitting Coronavirus...
What for ? To maintain the customer service, to sell or moderate social networks...for UBER, Google, Engie, Orange and others like Amazon, Air B’N’B, Bell Canada...

Our question is extremely simple : How can our jobs, regarding the health emergency that we are going through, be considered as essential ?
Do tell us ! How can it be ?

Incidents keep building up as promiscuity and working conditions are an ultra fertile base to the spread of the virus. Call-center come up with infected people everyday, sometimes dozens of them, and they close down... to reopen, at the best, a few hours or days later.

 Work, confinement, money ? And what about human beings ?

Trade unions such as UGTT (Tunisia), Sud-Solidaires (France), UMT (Moroco), CGT (Spanish state), SYNTIC (Cameroon), CSC-CNE (Belgium), STCC (Portugal), CWA (USA) denounce the fact that safety measures are still not implemented in call-centres.
In some countries, such as Belgium, the massive development of telework and compliance with the rules have been implemented.
While here and there, confinement measures are decided by governments while explaining us that we have to keep working (Tunisia, France, Moroco...).
Our bosses go as far now as require the help of the repressive force of the State to make us work, like in France.
To them, to jeopardize workers’ health means nothing regarding the continuity of their services and especially their dividends.

Around the world, mobilization is growing thanks to calls for strike (Portugal, Tunisia...) or petitions, like in France or Greece.

In Peru, Konnecta workers, feeling endangered, called for the police to enforce the shut down of the platform by the company after a known case of infection was reported...
Let’s be clear, workers who go to work everyday, sick with fear, do not want to end up in the situation of that Albanese Teleperformance call-centre where more than a hundred people are in quarantine...

In Tunisia, several companies, have announced their shut down due to the dangerous situation: Concentrix, Transcom, SPB, Teleperformance... did it too.. So, yes, it can be done !

Trade unions such as UGTT (Tunisia, Sud-Solidaires (France), UMT (Moroco), CGT (Spanish state), SYNTIC (Cameroon), CSC-CNE (Belgium), STCC (Portugal) and CWA (USA) refuse to jeopardize the lives of our workmates and of our famillies by keeping producing a meaningless service, with no safety.

We demand teleworking to be implemented wherever it is possible regarding the network and the conditions.
In places where it is not possible as well as where the service is essential, like, for instance, the service linked to delivering information about the COVID 19, we demand the following minimum security measures to be implemented :

• Hydro-alcoholic gel, soap, disinfectant wipes, continuously provided to the workers ;

• No more than 50 persons by platform ;

• 1,5 metre distance between workers ;

• Evacuation of the workplace until its disinfection, in known or suspected case of infection ;

Without any of the above measures, we demand production to be stopped !

The highly vulnerable, mainly female subcontractors in that field do not and will not accept to become canon fodder for the capitalist system.
We are reasserting, now more than ever, that our lives are worth more than their profits !

➔ We demand the shut down of all non-essential contact centres across the world. We shall not let any workmate die...

➔ We demand full payment of our average salaries over the last 12 months, here and there.
Multinational companies in that field cannot use the crisis to save money in the countries where laws are less protective.
Our bosses have to pay our salaries by turning to large contracting firms.

➔ We demand the end of sanctions for the use of the right to withdraw, absences and the end of dis- missals.
We demand the shut down of all non-essential contact centres around the world.

 You can support us too by signing our petition http://chng.it/5Y7YDxJ2sz