Workforce Management Featured Article
Chilean Law to Protect Contact Center Worker Rights Goes into Effect
For many companies, outsourcing contact center services such as customer support to a foreign country makes sense. It saves on labor and allows companies to take advantage of agents who may be better educated than agents in the U.S. It helps organizations “follow the sun” and keep longer hours by taking advantage of call centers in other time zones. For contact centers in Mexico, Central and South America, it opens up vast resources of agents who are multilingual in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
But there are also downsides to foreign contact center outsourcing, and in many cases, agents simply don’t enjoy the workers’ rights that U.S.-based agents do. Some more unscrupulous operators are taking advantage of call center workers, and the U.S. companies that use these services may be unaware of these abuses.
In Chile, the government recently took steps to protect call center workers rights. The Chilean Labour Inspectorate recently published guidance on the country’s new “Teleoperators Law” that went into effect on September 1st. The goal of the law is to clarify the employment status of call center workers and sets out their rights relating to pay, working hours and breaks. To begin, it asserts that call center workers’ contracts are employment contracts and therefore have all the characteristics and fulfill all the requirements of an individual employment contract.
Another objective is to ensure fair pay for Chilean call center workers by establishing that there should be no uncertainty regarding workers’ activities and the remuneration that they generate, and that individual, objective and verifiable parameters should be established to determine the work performed. Each call – and the pay it generates – should be clearly detailed and outlined in pay stubs to workers, and each call center worker’s log-in details for connecting and making calls need to be secret and personal to the worker to prevent employers from limiting the number of sales that the worker can make.
Finally, call center workers in Chile have the right to a 10-second interruption between calls, as well as a 30-minute daily rest within the workday.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
