Philippines, the call‑center capital: Taking a deluge of calls for under $2 an hour

It’s Saturday night in Manila, but 25-year-old Chris, who just graduated with a master’s degree, is not getting ready to party. His chair at a call center awaits him, so he is hurriedly eating a plate of street food before settling in to attend a flood of phone calls coming from the United States. In a skyscraper located in the modern neighborhood of Makati, Chris will resolve the doubts of clients living on the other side of the Pacific, where the sun is just beginning to rise. He’s been with the company Conentrix, which subcontracts with large financial and technological corporations, for five years. He earns $337 a month.

Chris gets to work at 11 p.m. And leaves at 8 a.m. He covers the graveyard shift, so called for the silence that reigns in the early hours of dawn. This schedule is the norm for many of the roughly 1.5 million Filipinos employed in call centers, according to data from the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP), an employer association for business process outsourcing (BPO).

IBPAP covers a wide range of functions that large companies typically outsource, most notably customer service and technical support. The Philippines is a world leader in the former, says Carole Gaffud, director and head of research and innovation for IBPAP. The latter area is typically the domain of India. Both countries offer similar advantages: low costs and a population where a large portion has excellent English skills.

Around 70% of BPO in the Philippines comes from the United States, explains Gaffud. That is the same percentage, according to data from IBPAP, that U.S. Companies save by locating their services in the Asian country. Residents of the archipelago have a neutral accent and according to Gaffud, offer “cultural compatibility, empathy, friendly service and strict adherence to protocols.”

With the arrival of the internet and lower cost of international calls, the BPO sector has seen unending growth in the Philippines. The industry has grown nonstop since the end of the 1990s. Today, it is worth $39.5 billion and represents 8% of the country’s GDP. Last year its earnings increased by 5% and its number of employees by 4%. The number of the total workers (including both those who answer phones and others in non-telephonic services) is nearly two million.

As it is totally dependent on foreign markets, this pillar of the Philippine economy could be ruined if a current legislative initiative to protect U.S. Industry goes ahead. A bill that was introduced in August 2025 and has a rather explicit name — the Keep Call Centers in America Act — would provide incentives to companies that opt to operate within the United States, as well as harsh deterrents to those that continue to outsource such jobs. If approved, it could have catastrophic effects on the Philippines. Gaffud acknowledges her company’s concerns, but adds that at this point, IBPAP members are adopting a “wait-and-see attitude,” and are working on “dialogue and a study of possible implications.”

For now, Filipino call centers continue at a frenetic pace. In cities like Manila and Cebú, it has become normal to see young people coming and going in the middle of the night from well-lit buildings that fill the major business districts. Before starting their shifts and during breaks, they often flock to the food stalls that have sprung up alongside the BPO boom — modest stands selling skewers or rice dishes that have turned the early hours of the morning into their peak business time. While the rest of the city sleeps, they’re swarmed by 20-somethings, who always look like they’re in a rush, ID badges hanging from their necks.

Working in a call center offers an easy entry point into the job market. Although most applicants are university students, in theory all one needs is good English and some problem‑solving ability. An employee with no experience makes around $291 a month (about $1.74 an hour) for a 40-hour workweek. The average minimum wage — which in the Philippines depends on days worked and in what region — would be $186 for the same amount of time. A taxi driver has to work 12 hours, six days a week to make $349.

Renso Bajala, secretary general of the BPO Industry Employees Network (BIEN), acknowledges that call‑center wages are higher than in other fast‑growing sectors in the country, such as semiconductors. But he insists that the poorer conditions faced by other workers — or the unrealistic minimum wage set by the authorities — say nothing about the fairness or unfairness that defines the BPO sector itself.

“With a monthly salary of $291 or $349 you can’t, by a long shot, earn a living in urban areas in the Philippines,” says Clifford Temprosa, who runs a social‑enterprise consultancy. In October last year, he published an article denouncing the sector for “exporting exploitation.” Interestingly, a recruiting agency for call center workers admitted in a 2025 report at for a person living in Manila, basic monthly expenses (rent, transportation, food) are at least $582.

According to data from BIEN, subcontracting companies — the biggest are Concentrix, Accenture and Teleperformance, none of which agreed to provide an interview for this article — earn around $1,500 per month for their clients per worker. Until his recent dismissal from Concentrix, Bajala earned $407 a month answering calls for American Express. “In the United States, you would earn no less than $2,500,” he says. Though his former employer posted losses last year, its shareholders earned $256 million. Its biggest competitor in the Philippines, the international corporation Accenture, reported earnings of $7.56 billion during the same period.

Call center manager in Manila

“That’s how you make the big bucks,” sums up a manager of another Manila call center as he smokes at the foot of a glass tower. “My subordinates are university students with nearly native English who are capable of multi-tasking under a lot of pressure. Their wages are very far from fair,” says the manager says. At 46 years of age, with 12 years of experience and 25 people under his supervision, he earns $873 a month.

From the employers’ association, Carole Gaffud speaks of good intentions. “I want to believe that our companies are genuinely concerned about the well-being of their employees, whether that’s in terms of salaries or other benefits.” She explains that AI is “creating a lot of value” for BPO services, adding that this could help companies increase workers’ salaries. Fewer jobs, but better-paid? Gaffud is optimistic. “Not necessarily,” she says. “I predict that there will be fewer basic jobs, and more highly skilled ones.”

Bajala was fired from Concentrix precisely for telling a journalist how AI was affecting his work. He said that performance and satisfaction metrics increasingly depend on how the machine evaluates call center agents’ tone of voice, or on the number of times the customer says “yes” or “thank you.” Beyond the way it is increasing surveillance of employees, Bajala has no doubt that AI will be the end of many jobs. Unless workers take action, he warns, there will be fewer and fewer positions, and they will be just as poorly paid.

It’s not easy to fight for better working conditions in the Philippines. According to the International Trade Union Confederation, it’s among the 10 worst countries in the world when it comes to labor rights. The ITUC reported that Filipino union leaders are under constant monitoring from politicians, judges and law enforcement, who sometimes invent criminal charges, accusing unionists of belonging to violent communist organizations. Speaking out can even cost one’s life. A report from the ITUC found that 72 Filipino trade unionists were killed between 2016 and 2023.

Alongside the fear of losing their jobs and institutional repression, there is also, in Clifford Temprosa’s words, a “culture of resignation, that idea that, since things could be worse, one shouldn’t complain too much.” Banjala confirms this tendency toward inaction: “We do a lot of field work in the large BPO hubs, and the majority of people show little interest in our cause, arguing that other sectors pay less and offer worse conditions.”

High turnover in the industry doesn’t help the situation either, as it discourages long-term union battles. Working in a call center is often a kind of rite of passage for university students or recent graduates. Like Chris, the young man who eats hurriedly at a street stall before beginning his graveyard shift. He says he only wants to “survive” as he looks for a decent job in marketing, his true vocation.

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