The story of the "Blue Call" call center in Milan seized by the judiciary for criminal infiltration calls many reflections on a problem that has long been under the attention of Governments (including the latter), but which until now has not received the attention necessary to put a stop to an already very compromised drift.
The call center "sector" today directly involves over 70 workers, the vast majority with fixed-term contracts or fake project work. The companies manage the customer relationship (custom relationship - CRM) through third parties, which the large economic entities managed on their own up to twenty years ago, while in the smaller units the relationship with the customers was managed by the legendary "switchboard". Call centers generally take the form of large companies with thousands of employees in which the cost of labor accounts for more than 85% of the total cost; this figure helps to understand why workers are sometimes used as "human shields" to endorse otherwise unthinkable and unacceptable operations. And in fact, if a territory, not only in the South as "Blue Call" teaches, is seen proposing entrepreneurial initiatives that quickly employ hundreds of people, the brakes and controls loosen a lot and so everything sneaks into business. I recall that the story of the Milanese call center is unique for its explicit criminal implications (as told by the interceptions reported by the newspapers), but it comes after a long series of crises, terminations, transfers of ownership that have affected the judicial news with serious consequences for the income and work of thousands of people.
But what are the industrial policy reasons that make this sector so susceptible to illegitimate and criminal behavior? And to this question I add: who are the call center customers? How did the market originate and what are the dominant rules today? Only by looking for an answer to these questions will it be possible to understand the mechanisms for many unique aspects that characterize the sector.
The customers are above all the large industrial service companies, as well as the public administrations, each on their own account or aggregated in consortium forms. For over 20 years, in the context of outsourcing processes of what is considered "not core", the call center was entrusted to large companies that were often improvised because, erroneously, it was thought that it was easy to manage them; “It just takes a lot of phone lines and staff to answer the calls,” they say.
This is the context that has defined the current characteristics of the sector. To which it should be added that, as happened for other service activities (to which the call center is improperly associated), the outsourcing was accompanied by a strong cost recovery action through the imposition of tariffs often lower than those envisaged by the employment contracts . A large telephone operator today calls tenders with tariffs of 0,035 euro for each minute of conversation which is equivalent to an average revenue of around 18 euro/hour which does not allow not only the return on invested capital, but also complete coverage of structural costs. It must be said, however, that call center companies are often undercapitalised and with very low fixed investments because it is (erroneously) believed that technological innovation is superfluous. This is especially true for some medium-large national companies.
By understanding this set of arguments, one understands the reasons that lead too many companies to seek every subterfuge or escape route to recover margins.
What are these escape routes?
1) Local administrations intervene (sometimes with obvious patronage reasons) to integrate with public finance what customers do not allow companies to achieve.
2) The business is brought to countries where the cost of labor is much lower and there are no language barriers (for example Albania, Croatia or some Latin American countries).
3) Employment contracts and laws are violated which, it must be said, are not balanced because they are unrealistic and push even honest people not to apply them.
Often all this is combined and justified with the "superior" need to defend jobs, involving even trade union organizations in operations that are not always transparent. It is clear that we are dealing with an industrial policy problem which requires adequate interventions to make call centres, and more generally those who supply technological services, companies capable of competing fairly on the national market, but also on international ones. This has happened in other European countries where companies with high technological standards and very important international projections thrive.
Let's try to identify some of the possible interventions:
a) Prevent anomalous behavior of the application. Tenders that value only the economic content and built according to the logic of the maximum discount are harmful because they create an objective distortion of the market. This also happens in public administrations.
b) Promote, with incentives and tax credits, companies strongly oriented towards technological innovation. Let's not forget that we are talking about voice simulators, translators, flow management systems, etc. operating on the frontier of SW innovation which sees many Italian companies in the development of new applications. And let's not forget that social network technologies are also based on similar technologies.
d) Eliminate any form of distorted public support for job 'creation' (for example, with Law 407/90 some Regions finance new businesses set up only for the period useful for benefiting from subsidies). Also in this case there is disturbance of competition and distortion of the labor market: principles censored by the EU, but violated in many Italian regions.
e) Encourage business combinations as an essential condition for supporting greater capitalization functional to technological development and skilled employment growth.
Without qualified interventions, the call center sector (but not only) is destined, on the one hand, to remain marginal on the frontier of technologies, but on the other, will continue to be the subject of attention by the new criminals who intend to conquer businesses, above all services and construction with high employment impact and high financial turnover.
In short: without a targeted industrial policy, the consequences will be even worse than the already harmful ones read in the news in recent weeks, but which have already been present for some time both in the north and in the south of the country.
