08/07/2026
✌️✊ Behind every helpline, support ticket, chat conversation, and many jobs across the offshoring sector, there are real workers carrying the pressure of demanding targets, long hours, constant monitoring and often insufficient recognition.
This meeting was an important step toward making their voices heard, recognizing the health impact of this work, and pushing for stronger protections, fairer conditions and decent work across the sector.
The people powering customer support, tech support, data processing and the wider offshoring economy deserve dignity, protection and a fair share of the value they help create.
Every time you call a helpline, message support or wait for a chat reply, someone on the other end is doing that job. Across the Middle East and North Africa, those workers – in call centres, tech support and data processing – often do it for low pay, long hours and constant monitoring.
Forty union leaders and activists met in Casablanca last month to say enough. Their demand: recognize the health consequences of this work as occupational diseases, and let unions help decide how to prevent them.
Unions included the UGTT - الاتحاد العام التونسي للشغل - (page officielle) and الاتحاد المغربي للشغل Union Marocaine du Travail UMT, and they talked about calling on governments, like Morocco's, to ratify the new ILO treaty on decent work in the platform economy – the first binding global rules for these workers, agreed in June 2026.
“Across Middle East and North Africa, heavy workloads, low wages, long hours, relentless targets are the costs workers pay for a race to the bottom in the sector. That’s why workers speaking up and taking action are so important,” Keith Jacobs, Regional Secretary of UNI Africa.
The sector is growing fast. The people behind it should share in that. ✊
The meeting was organized with support from Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
