A BPO provider from Chile blamed its financial collapse on the country’s recently implemented 40-hour workweek.
BPO firm CallSouth will be closing its doors after two decades of operation. The company tried to stay afloat financialy through judicial proceedings earlier in the year. These did not work out, however, forcing CallSouth to declare bankruptcy.
CallSouth told Chilean news publication Diario Financiero that it had been “strongly affected, in an economic sense, by labor and production costs” during COVID and that, once the pandemic ended, it was hit hard by the introduction of a reduced workweek in Chile.
Chile introduced a 40-hour workweek in April of 2024, cutting it down from 45 hours. The new regulation aims to improve work-life balance and is part of a wider trend towards reduction of working hours in the region. Latin America is known for having some of the longest working hours in the world, a damning statistic when one considers that the region is also among the least productive.
The latest regulation is Chile’s second workweek reduction in two decades. In 2005, the country cut down weekly working hours from 48 to 45.
As of September 30 of this year, more than 5,400 companies had adopted the new workweek in Chile. The law also introduced flexible arrangements, allowing employees to work four days a week with three days off, and included provisions for flexible start and end times for parents and caregivers.
Headquartered in downtown Santiago, CallSouth employed around 1,200 people across its operations in Chile, Peru and Colombia.
The company offered customer service and telemarketing solutions, with major clients including Cencosud, BancoEstado and MetLife.
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