The Union of Private Sector Employees in Chania and the Chania department of the Union of Workers in Teleperformance (SETEP) report the following:
Teleperformance’s management has taken exploitation and inhumane treatment of workers to new extremes. Especially in its Chania department, where hundreds of workers from Northern European countries reside, exploitation of workers has reached new lows. While the Greek branch of the multinational company announced record profits for 2023, our unions keep receiving complaints from workers that the company overcharges them for electricity and housing costs.
The company automatically deducts from workers’ wages electricity charges at 40 to 45 cents a kilowatt hour (at a time when national electricity charges are around 11 cents). The workers report that they do not receive electricity bills and there aren’t any meters in their apartments to count consumption. In many cases, excessive deductions for housing services that should have been otherwise common sense and provided for free are deducted from the workers’ salaries. One characteristic example is the one of a worker who had 440 euros deducted from his salary for “cleaning” after management forced him to move to another provided apartment.
These practices result in workers losing 200 to 300 euros from their salaries every month for apartments of 20 to 30 square meters in addition to the rent. Worth pointing out also is the fact that clothes washing machines in the apartments are located in common areas, and in most cases the apartments are only equipped with a simple kitchen hob for cooking. So in no realistic scenario could the monthly consumption of such an apartment approach the outrageous amounts of 300 euros.
Of course, the above practices affect all the employees of the company in Chania, who come here from northern European countries with promises from the company for apartments in hotels with modern facilities… Only to find unacceptable conditions in the apartments provided to them. They are crammed into nearly abandoned hotel facilities of the previous century, with mold and cockroaches in their rooms.
We are now seeing this inhumane treatment of the company towards workers culminate to new lows with the company going forward with a retaliative firing of a worker after she had gone on strike. Despite the fact that there is already a pending complaint to the labour inspectorate on this case, the company is forcing the worker to leave the provided apartment on the same day that she was told she was being fired.
As if that wasn’t enough, on pay day, the company had the nerve to pay the worker just TWO EUROS in spite of her having worked normally for the whole month of May. In other words, the company expects the employee to take on moving expenses with this “salary”… The company’s excuse for paying 2 EUR as salary was that the deductions for electricity costs for three months had allegedly reached the outrageous amount of 954 EUR!
As if all this was not enough, the company found something more to charge the employee. As there was no cleaning equipment anywhere when she entered the room, she asked for help to clean the mold that was already there from the managers. And as if by magic, this charge plus the euros “owed” in electricity, resulted in the remaining salary being just 2 euros…
We therefore denounce the unacceptable stance of the company, which, while serving giant companies as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Samsung, Mercedes Benz, Miele, Scalable Capital, Sage, Electrolux, Vattenfall, Telia, etc., but also Greece’t Public Power Corporation, OTE and many others, earning increasing record profits year after year, expects from the workers to tolerate conditions of modern slavery.
We demand collective agreements with 20% increases in wages for all company employees nationwide, an end to abusive salary deductions, workers to be given the opportunity to choose their electricity supply contract receiving their bill as they are entitled to, that housing be provided based on the real needs of the workers and that workers be given notice with a reasonable period of time if they are asked to leave the provided housing (especially since many workers leave their homes in distant countries to come to Greece) and for our colleague to immediately receive her lost salaries.
