Around 18 percent of French telecom operators' costs are spent on call centres, whether in-house or outsourced, according to a study by AT Kearney. Half of their call centre workers are based abroad, mainly in Tunisia and Morocco.
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Orange estimates that 80-90 percent of call centre employees are in France. Free stated that over 4,000 of employees worked in phone-based help, some in the Paris area. Its Total Call subsidiary in Morocco has 1,700 staff. It is difficult to know how many call centre employees work abroad for French operators because outsourcers do not always have reporting obligations, but Sebastien Crozier of the CFE CGC-Unsa union puts the figure at around 30,000, or around as many as those that work in France. The country's call centre association, SP2C, estimates that between 5,000 and 10,000 jobs are under threat in the short term.
