Call centres on strike: trade unions sound the alarm over 13,000 jobs
A nationwide strike and picket lines in various cities are taking place today. There are 5,000 redundancies in the disputes already underway. The trade unions are calling on the government to organise talks with major clients
Around 5,000 redundancies in ongoing disputes, with further crises on the horizon affecting 10,000 employees. It is against this backdrop that outsourced call centres are holding today’s national strike, on Wednesday 11 November 2026. According to Slc Cgil, Fistel Cisl and Uilfpc Uil, automation and artificial intelligence risk rendering 30 per cent of the sector’s approximately 43,000 employees – covered by the telecommunications collective agreement – structurally redundant. That amounts to nearly 13,000 jobs. Meanwhile, around ten agreements on social safety nets have been signed, covering a total of around 15,000 workers.
The crisis stems from a decline in volumes. As trade unions have repeatedly highlighted when drawing attention to the sector’s difficulties, banks, telecoms operators and energy companies are increasingly automating customer enquiries. Contracted service providers are receiving fewer calls. This shift is taking place in a sector that has already been scaled back due to offshoring and cut-throat tendering.
The crisis has a distinct geographical pattern. According to the trade union report, 70 per cent of employees work in the South and on the islands, where, during the boom years, call centres mainly provided jobs for young people and women. Nationally, women still account for around 65 per cent of those employed in the sector. In inbound call handling alone, just before 2010, there were around 80,000 employees.
“The tools currently available are obsolete and do not provide the solutions needed for a major reskilling programme towards the roles enabled by digitalisation,” the trade unions argue. They are calling on the Government to establish a permanent round-table at the Ministries of Enterprise and Labour, involving companies in the sector and major public and private clients. The proposal is to plan workloads over several years and require those contracting the service to ensure job security throughout the supply chain. In tendering processes, the unions are calling for the weighting of price to be limited to 20–30 per cent and for a guarantee that, when contracts change hands, workers will retain their working hours and length of service.
The other key issue is what role staff should play once the bot has taken over basic enquiries. The trade unions are calling for the telecoms sector’s solidarity fund to be strengthened and for funding to be provided for training in the handling of complex cases and the supervision of AI systems. The proposal also suggests using productivity gains to reduce working hours whilst maintaining the same pay, citing the 32-hour week as an example.
