ABSTRACT
Call centres work as virtual assembly lines. Mechanized work leads to a strong feeling of imprisonment, alienation, stress, illnesses of the physical and psychic realm. Typically, recruitment processes is done through a temporary work agency in which the worker fills a form and expects to be subsequently called for personal interviews held in the call center. If that situation happens he/she will be doing attendance at an assessment centre and/ or a face-to-face interview, usually involving some form of role-playing exercise. In addition, some
1 THE PORTUGUESE CONTACT CENTRES
In the 21st century, the growth of the service sector has marked global economy, engendering new forms of work organization and labor market. The advances in the capacity, cheapness and sophistication of telecommunications technology allowed the growth of a more customer-focused culture and an increasingly tele-literate population, leading to new forms of service delivery. Technological innovation and organizational rationalization strategies, such as outsourcing, are factors that have been the basis for expansion of call centres, mainly in the 1990’s. Call centres are a symbol of the modern service economy in which services are available all around the clock, being deliverable from almost any spot (Paul and Huws, 2002 :4-9). Contact centres are one of the areas which personifies the whole set of technological innovation (Castells, 1996), contracting the unemployed precariat (Paugam, 2000). They also represent the fastest developing form of e-work, being considered as “information processing factories” or “modern-day sweatshops”, providing images of call handlers chained to cage-like workstations by their headphones (Paul and Huws, 2002: 71).
