At the time of the interviews, all workers were employed in the call and contact service and living in the various regions of Portugal Mainland. According to our interviewees, this is an activity carried out mainly by female workers, aged between 25 and 50 years old and who make this as their main source of subsistence. The sociodemographic characteristics of this sample comprise four women and two men, aged between twentytwo and forty-seven years old. Most of them have a college degree and do not have any prior experience in this service. All the data were organised through qualitative analysis techniques (Bardin, 2011, Schreier , 2012; Zwick, 2018). A flexible coding scheme using MAXQDA qualitative software was used for analysing the interviews based on the operationalisation of the central concepts of the case study (Carmo et al., 2021; Schreier, 2012).
4 Immigration in Europe and Portugal
Since the 1980s that Portugal become a country of immigration, especially from its former colonies who arrived first, followed by migrants from Asian countries, as well as from Eastern Europe in the 2000s. According to Castles et al., (2014, pp. 16–17), the abolition of geographic, political, economic and cultural borders has led to the globalisation of migration, with a tendency for a growing number of countries to be simultaneously affected by migratory movements. International migrations can be associated with precarious conditions, especially with a loss of both home and protection, placing migrants in situations where they are vulnerable and at risk of exploitation and discrimination (Steger, 2013) that Portugal has become a country of immigration, especially from its former colonies who arrived first, followed by migrants from Asian countries, as well as from Eastern Europe in the 2000s.
In fact, Bauman makes the distinction between tourists, from the global north, and migrant vagabonds from the south, who are forced to dislocate to escape poverty and to find work, asylum or refuge because of war, discrimination, climate change, and other factors (Bauman, 1998). The most common case is regarding labour migrants (Kritz, 2016) who are driven by “push” factors (e.g. a lack of work or low wage in their homeland and “pull” factors (jobs and higher pay available elsewhere)). Vagabonds tend to be those who have one or more (and often all) disesteemed statuses. They tend to be more likely to be poor, black, a member of a maligned ethnic group, female and from the South (Ritzer, 2010).
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