Our union denounces Teleperformance’s total refusal to help colleagues after they found themselves in dire need while injured. 

The incident involves two colleagues who came from abroad to work with the company and were seriously injured as victims of an incident at the company’s worker residences, as a result of which they were treated at the General Hospital of Chania with serious injuries.

Our colleagues, being injured and unable to work for many months, received a truly inhumane treatment from the company. While bedridden on the hospital’s emergency surgery clinic, the company cut off all contact with them.

The treatment our colleagues received from the company exposes the totally hypocritical image Teleperformance fries to present, claiming they’re the “best place to work”. Teleperformance even has the nerve to put the “best place to work” claim front and center when trying to attract workers from abroad. However, as evident from our report, as soon as workers come in need, they’re left to fend for themselves by the employer that brought them here from another country.

Our colleagues received absolutely no guidance from the company. No one informed them of their rights other than (the already overburdened) staff of our city hospital and our union.

It is a fact, however, that as permanent residents of other countries working for the first time in Greece, the colleagues were not entitled to any benefits from the public system other than emergency care. Neither a sickness allowance, despite their serious injuries and the fact that they were paying public insurance, nor even participation in the municipal food bank or even welfare benefits as they had no previous tax records in Greece.

The company therefore, knowing the situation of its injured workers, refused to provide any assistance or aid, despite multiple appeals for help from our colleagues as they themselves were from abroad and did not know how to navigate the Greek services to receive any assistance. The company even refused to contact its workers despite the fact that they made many attempts to inform their supervisors of the fact that they were in a miserable situation, with no food, no transport and no money. During this time the company even continued to charge its injured workers the predatory amount of 0.45 € / kilowatt, as it does to all its employees who live in its apartments in Chania, automatically deducting these amounts from current and future wages.

Our colleagues had requested that they be offered work from home so that they could work from a more secure space and not risk their health with viral diseases that they might catch in the offices, that would put them at serious risk due to their weak immune system after injuries. It is a fact, moreover, that even now the company promotes many work from home jobs on its websites.

Not only did Teleperformance deny this request, but as if all that was not enough, after one colleague was forced to return to the office, on October 14, Teleperformance’s management informed him that he was being dismissed on the grounds that he was “taking too many absences at work”, completely disregarding that these absences were due to injuries that were treated in the hospital… This was even while he was suffering from acute tonsillitis, even having provided the employer with the corresponding documentation from a doctor!

Based on all of the above, we DEMAND:

<< IMMEDIATELY adopt an insurance system at least for the first year of employment for all residents of other countries coming to Greece to work with Teleperformance; covering incidents like accident, injury, illness etc. even for the pediod which these would not be covered by the public system. So no other colleague has to suffer in the future!

<< To COMPENSATE the colleagues as at least a belated of support for the suffering caused by the company’s refusal to help them when it was most necessary.

<< TAKE BACK the dismissal and offer the colleagues work from home positions so that they can work with dignity and without their health conditions being further burdened.

<< To immediately implement the general demands:

-Free transportation to and from the offices, a service for which colleagues in Chania are charged 50€ per month until now.

-A 20% wage increase.

-To halt the predatory practice of the automatically deducting from the salaries of colleagues living in company apartments electricity charges at 0.45€ per kilowatt hour, in many cases even without electricity meters…