“It’s very difficult to build a call centre career in Portugal because I have seen colleagues who have risen to supervisory positions and are worse off than when they were answering lines, colleagues who can’t even have lunch anymore. They don’t leave call centres out of fear or convenience of finding something else. They are constantly disappointed with it. I don’t see it as career, but as a job that helps those who are immigrants and compared to it. Others, for example, such as cleaning and restoration, are lighter work, but it is work that takes a lot of energy from you, the emotional fatigue is enormous”. [E13, Man, 43 years old, Brazil]
7 Discussion
Considering the research questions raised in this article, the analysis of these portraits allowed to demonstrate that immigrant occupational trajectories are built of constant instability and precariousness, fearing dismissal, for they live in the here and now (Antunes, 2011, 2020; Carmo et al., 2021; Doellgast et al., 2018; Kalleberg, 2018; Keune & Pedaci, 2020). Individuals perceive this type of work as a way of escaping unemployment and integrate the labour market, even though they realise the real dangers this could bring in the near future, especially due to the eventuality of not being able to access basic labour rights.
Digital platform work is not a mere trend, but a process which has been growing, especially after the pandemic, employing the most economically vulnerable, typically immigrant, male and racialised workers (Zwick, 2018). In the twenty-first century, it is crucial to analyse the workingclass experience and its morphology and to understand the complexity of post-industrialised societies that are undergoing a process of digital transformation and a consequent dehumanisation of work with the subordination to the algorithm and the transfer of risks to workers, where workers become obsolete and disposable, being “outdated” and replaced by others that are less demanding and flexible, or even by machines (Abílio, 2017; Kalleberg, 2009). The working-class must be understood as exploring the intersections of class with gender, ethnic and sexual identities in the context of changes in patterns of immigration and the rise of new protest movements and forms of organising (Clarke & Hubble,
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