YOU NEED HELP with your bank account or advice about your mortgage. You call the help line. And then, after a lengthy wait, tapping more information into your phone and being transferred to the right department, you reach a call center worker, an actual human being. By that point, however, you might not be feeling warm and patient.
Usually, the person absorbing your frustration is in the Philippines—the call center capital of the world. (For years, India had more call center workers than any other nation, but more recently U.S. companies began relocating to the Philippines, where people speak American English, rather than the British variety.) The country is 12 or 13 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S., depending on the time of year, and most Filipino call center employees work through the night. Their mandate: to remain calm at all times.
While studying in London in 2015, Portuguese photographer José Sarmento Matos took a job at a British call center. That’s where he got the idea to travel to the Philippines and photograph some of its 1.2 million call center employees. “It’s a tough job,” Matos says. “I wanted to know what’s behind that. How do these people suffer on the other side?”