Turnover at the call center: a look from young people at a call center in Teresina, Piauí

Abstract

The metamorphosis of the world of global capitalist production changes historically, expanding its capacity based on its transitions in terms of its way of organizing labor, employment and production. The industrial and technological revolutions present, to a large extent, this rearrangement and bring to light “new” modifications arising from this metamorphosis of capital in the 21st century. Considering contemporary societies, which develop from a capitalist production logic, based on telematics, several intermediary branches emerge in productive activity intensive in information and communication, among them, Call Centers. Productive restructuring reconfigures the worker's variables and their form of insertion in the world of work. Factors that were previously not appropriated by capital, such as the subjective dimension, are now taken over by the way work is organized, in its new guise of flexible accumulation, outsourcing and other arrangements that capture the worker and alter their experiences in labor relations. Given this context, this study is about the work of young people in a Call Center company in Teresina, Piauí. Therefore, we seek to understand how the work of young people from Teresina in Call Centers is constituted in the face of processes of overexploitation of the workforce in a context of deformation of the world of work. Regarding theoretical and methodological procedures, the key categories and concepts are: outsourcing, flexibility, intensification of the service sector, overexploitation of work, Call Center, telemarketing, precarious work, emotional labor. Through these categories, we seek to understand how young people in Teresina see the Call Center as a way of entering the job market. The question of how work has been constituted in Call Center spaces, especially for the young workforce, has drawn attention, since workers are inserted in a context of deformations in the global sphere, of work. From the interviews carried out with these young people, it is possible to affirm that the work they carried out was considered a “stepping stone”, especially for those who are/were in higher education or have already completed it. Faced with this reality, all they have to do is continue as a telemarketing operator, so as not to find themselves caught up in the tragedy of unemployment. However, they did not consider the role they performed as a job, but just a means to cover their needs to continue building another alternative “life project”.