From: The union of Telecommunications Informatics Employees of Attica (SETIP), The Union of TelePerformance Employees (SETEP), The Union of Telecommunications Informatics Employees of Thessaloniki, The Union of Private Sector Employees of Chania

To: The Ministry of Labor and Social Security, The Ιndependent Labour Inspection Authority

Joint: All Teleperformance employees, regardless of the employment relationship under which they work

Teleperformance, which took our union to court to save time for the start of negotiations for collective bargaining, with arguments that even the courtroom staff laughed at, has been openly violating labor legislation and openly blackmailing workers for years. Day by day and as workers gain courage and strength from the organized struggle through our unions, complaints of gross violation of labor laws and gross extortion are arriving, even to the point of possibly criminal offenses.

Specifically:

• Τhe notorious “downsizing” that has been implemented for years is a contrived method of moving people to different jobs based on the company’s profit goals by trampling on our rights. We are TP employees! As long as the company, through its own fault, does not give us work, it is obliged to pay us! We need to stop believing the misinformation that we work for projects or payroll companies or clients. These are TP issues! If they want to move us between projects, they should pay us regularly and every day, regardless of when training is scheduled for the next project. We stay on our current projects until the day of the next training.
• In order to have the consent of the workers and to sign a leave without pay for as long as the employer wants, they threaten the colleagues that they will lock the codes to make them look unjustifiably absent and be fired without compensation! In other words, crude blackmail.
• They use the same method for those workers they want to fire to avoid paying severance pay and to avoid exceeding the mass layoff limit in the law.
• Employees work thousands of unpaid overtime hours, which “disappear” from the company’s logging system. Supervisors in particular, under the guise of being “members of lower management” and because they get a little more than other employees on the same job, that little more is offset by hundreds of individual hours of unpaid overtime, including nights and holidays. Will the TP now answer what legislation provides for this handling?
• They blackmail and threaten workers with various “arguments” (the project will go abroad, you won’t earn anything with the union, etc.) for their participation or not in the unions and its actions, in small group and even individual “meetings”!
• It proceeds to unilaterally change the terms of individual contracts, as often and when it suits them, without any prior notification, as for example in the case of workers in Chania, who come with contracts that provide for their accommodation, who have had their electricity bills deducted from their paychecks instead, while their contracts stated otherwise.
• TP has been holding thousands of workers hostage, for many years, that in addition to the unacceptable special purpose visa regime, alternating contracts with 6 different “third party” companies, so that the workers do not have an open-ended contract and do not have the corresponding rights and tenure resulting from their continuous work.
• So they pose as “legitimate” and drag our union to court and do whatever they want to ensure as much profit as possible. We are also particularly surprised that those colleagues who have resorted to labor inspection departments to seek protection from these practices, the answers they have received are that “there is nothing workers can do to protect themselves”!

We call on all relevant authorities to take all necessary measures to immediately stop the extortion and illegalities committed by the company.

We call on Teleperformance to stop these inhumane methods. Be well aware that they will not go unanswered. SETIP, SETEP, SETIP Thessaloniki and the Union of Private Sector Employees of Chania will be on the side of all workers and we will demand their just rights by any means necessary. All those who are being mistreated should contact and inform our unions so that we can support each other and change the situation. No one is alone!