Unions push to call BPO burnout an occupational disease

NYON, SWITZERLAND — A UNI Global Union seminar in Casablanca has called on Middle East and North Africa governments to formally classify psychosocial risks in business process outsourcing (BPO) work as an occupational disease, ratify ILO Convention No. 193 on Decent Work in the Platform Economy, and guarantee freedom of association for call-center and BPO workers.

According to a report from UNI Global Union, this frames the region’s large BPO workforce as operating under digital-era conditions that national labor law, written for an earlier economy, has not yet addressed.

Casablanca seminar targets BPO psychosocial risks as occupational disease

The seminar — organized by UNI Global Union and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, attended by representatives from Morocco’s Moroccan Labour Union (UMT) and Tunisia’s General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) — identified psychosocial risks specific to BPO delivery: heavy performance monitoring, erratic shifts, low pay, high turnover, and relentless target structures that distinguish call-center environments from other service-sector employment.

Formal occupational disease classification would require MENA governments to recognize sustained exposure to those working conditions as a legally defined occupational health hazard — triggering employer obligations for prevention, monitoring, and worker compensation that do not currently exist under national labor frameworks built before the sector’s scale.

Occupational disease classification shifts the legal burden from workers individually documenting harm to employers structurally preventing it — the same mechanism that transformed repetitive strain injury from a dismissed worker complaint into a managed employer liability across manufacturing and industrial sectors.

“Across Middle East and North Africa, heavy workloads, low wages, long hours, relentless targets are the costs workers pay,” said Keith Jacobs, Regional Secretary, UNI Africa.

ILO Convention 193 ratification anchors MENA BPO labor campaign

The call for ILO Convention No. 193 ratification — the ILO’s Decent Work in the Platform Economy standard, addressing employment relationships, algorithmic management, and generative AI governance in digitally mediated work — would create a binding labor framework for BPO workers that existing MENA national labor law, designed before the sector’s current scale, does not adequately provide.

Morocco and Tunisia are the MENA region’s primary BPO and nearshore delivery markets, attracting European call-center and BPO investment on French-language capability, geographic proximity to Europe, and labor cost advantages — making the gap between current working conditions and the seminar’s proposed protections a supply chain compliance risk for EU-domiciled clients with ESG and due-diligence obligations.

The seminar’s demands — occupational disease recognition, ILO Convention 193 ratification, and active union participation in developing preventive measures — align with the EU’s emerging supply chain due-diligence requirements, which oblige companies using MENA BPO delivery to verify that supplier labor practices meet standards that may not yet exist in national law.

For international BPO operators and enterprise buyers with Morocco and Tunisia delivery exposure, the Casablanca seminar signals that EU supply chain compliance obligations and ILO labor standards are converging toward a new due-diligence requirement — one that psychosocial risk management will need to satisfy alongside financial and data security audits.

UNI Global Union stated that BPO workers in the region are systematically denied freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, calling on governments to align national labor legislation with ILO standards as a precondition for the sector’s long-term workforce sustainability.

For BPO operators and enterprise buyers with MENA delivery exposure, the occupational disease classification campaign is the leading edge of a regulatory shift already visible in Europe’s platform economy legislation — formalized psychosocial risk standards in any major BPO market establish precedents that multinational clients apply globally, regardless of where national law currently stands.