I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of being a call center employee as a ticket to the middle class. I think I see the “call center employees might be trafficked” narrative more often than “call center jobs are an entry to white-collar employment”

The ILO paper calls the underlying risk a white-collar bypass: the office jobs that carried a generation into the middle class in higher-income countries may not fully materialize in today’s lower-income economies. The broader version of that story is not yet visible in the headcount data. White-collar employment in these countries is not only growing but paying well. Nevertheless, the decline in call centers in middle- and lower-income countries may be a harbinger of what is to come, since the occupation that best fits the description of the exposed, entry-level, formal office job is indeed the one disappearing so quickly and so broadly after the release of ChatGPT.