Contact Center Operations in Brazil: new locations and uneven geographic development

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the territorial dispersion of teleservice operations for Metropolitan Regions in the Brazilian Northeast and for non-metropolitan urban centers in the country. It is about analyzing how Contact Center companies appropriate and deepen the uneven geographic development (SMITH, 1988), that is, how the selective use of the technical and informational density (SANTOS, 1996) of the Brazilian territory allows companies to incorporation of areas where resources, mainly capital and labor, are not as valued as in the main metropolises of the Southeast. New information and communication technologies enabled a strategic and organizational change in call centers, as the places where agents made telephone contacts with customers were called until the beginning of the 2000s. In addition to traditional telemarketing services, they began to add a greater number of operations, with different media, becoming called Contact Centers (CONNELL; BURGUESS, 2006). The spread of activities in the Brazilian market, practically non-existent before privatizations, was significant between 1999 and 2019, with an average increase of 15% p.a. in your billing. Between 2012 and 2021, the Northeast region saw a 126% growth in the number of operators, compared to a 26% increase across Brazil. This growth reveals two distinct movements. The first, between 2002 and 2012, with concentration in the three Metropolitan Regions of Salvador (BA), Recife (PE) and Fortaleza (CE), and the second from 2013 onwards, with the expansion of operations to other metropolitan regions. Among them, Maceió (AL), Teresina (PI) and Aracaju (SE) were those that concentrated the greatest growth. Regarding the challenge of understanding Brazilian capitalism and the specificity of its contradictions (BRANDÃO, 2016), the study represents a privileged observation point. First of all because it is the sector that created the most formal jobs in the 2000s (BRAGA, 2014). Paradoxically, the inclusion of thousands of workers, especially female workers, in the formal market did not generate an increase in income or an improvement in the living conditions of this historically neglected population. Nor did the migration of the sector to the Northeast Region, with the multiplication of jobs and the profusion of investment in infrastructure demanded by companies, result in tackling the serious and indisputable regional inequalities in Brazil (ARAÚJO, 2000; BRANDÃO, 2018; CANO, 2000; DINIZ, 1995). Furthermore, the fact of employing young people, most of them with their first experience in the formal market, black and brown women, the majority with children (ABT, 2023), and sexual and gender minorities, did not lead to emancipation or denied social justice insistently to this population (LEITNER; PECK; SHEPPARD, 2007). The formalization provided by the generation of jobs in Contact Center operations was characterized by low wages, increased turnover and deterioration of working conditions (VENCO, 2007; ANTUNES, 2009; ALMEIDA, 2013). The sector, therefore, has been fed by a vast contingent of precarious workers subjected to underpaid occupations (up to 1.5 minimum wages), which represent more than 60% of all jobs in the country (DEDECCA; ROSANDISKI, 2006). One of the hypotheses formulated from the analysis of academic productions and preliminary data is that the most important criterion for choosing municipalities to set up operations is the reduction of labor costs (PECK, 1996). Thus, the vicious cycle of enrichment of the ruling class and deepening of inequalities is reinforced, the social gap between the rich and the working class grows (PAUGAM, 2009). It is therefore intended to analyze the effect of this process of incorporating new areas and poor people excluded from the formal market, flexible and alienated work (ANTUNES, 2009; HEWISON, 2016). (AU)