Marrakech – The National Federation of Call Centers and Offshoring Professions, affiliated with the Moroccan Labor Union (UMT), sent a memo to the government on Tuesday calling for urgent action to protect jobs in a sector facing new foreign regulations and the rapid spread of artificial intelligence and automation.
The federation described the sector as being at a decisive turning point. It warned the shift threatens thousands of jobs but could become an opportunity under proactive and fair policies. Its central demand is an urgent tripartite dialogue between the government, worker representatives, and employers to revise Morocco’s offshoring offer by 2030.
The memo, signed by Secretary General Ayoub Saoud, set out several measures. It called for tasking the National Labor Market Observatory with tracking the impact of these changes, collecting sectoral data, and identifying threatened jobs, training needs, and the skills required by 2030. It also asked for worker representatives to be included in the Technical Committee for Offshoring.
The federation urged a national retraining program before any technology-linked layoff, with recognized certifications and real transition paths toward digital occupations.
Other measures included linking public support to commitments on jobs, training, and working conditions; permanent social dialogue on AI and automation; steering the sector toward higher value-added work in technology, data, and AI; and diversifying markets and activities.
The memo followed the first closures tied to France’s new rules on B2C telephone canvassing, which took effect on August 11. Professionals can no longer cold-call French consumers without prior consent, and must be able to prove it. For call centers dependent on canvassing, the change directly challenges their model.
LesEco reported on August 27 that small structures had already ceased activity, with about a hundred jobs lost, according to the federation. At that point, Saoud was following two closure cases in Casablanca, including one at Technopark where roughly 50 employees had been left in difficulty.
Speaking to Médias24 on Tuesday, Saoud gave more detail. “We already have companies closing and workers who find themselves overnight without a job and sometimes without their rights,” he told the outlet.
At the Technopark company, the union had turned to the labor inspectorate without resolving the case, the site had since closed, and the manager was no longer reachable. The dispute is now before the Provincial Commission of Inquiry and Conciliation, chaired by the governor.
He also reported the closure of a company in the Gauthier district, where nearly 100 employees lost their jobs, many of them sub-Saharan African workers, some without employment contracts. Without consolidated figures, he estimated around 10,000 jobs already lost.
Saoud warned that favorable court rulings do not always translate into payment. He recalled a case last year in which more than 30 rulings proved hard to enforce after the manager left the country. Workers also face delays accessing the CNSS job-loss benefit when an employer disappears without regularizing their status.
For Saoud, the crisis was foreseeable. The consent law was adopted in 2025, giving the sector more than a year to prepare, yet no real reconversion mechanism was deployed. He argued the state must share the cost, noting that workers with ten or fifteen years in call centers cannot be told overnight to find another job and need income during any training period.
Youssef Chraibi, president of the Moroccan Federation of Service Outsourcing (FMES) and cofounder of Outsourcia, offered a more measured view.
In March, the Minister of Economic Inclusion, Small Business, Employment, and Skills, Younes Sekkouri, had put the number of potentially exposed jobs at 40,000 to 50,000, with a particularly marked risk for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Chraibi’s diagnosis is narrower. Of some 90,000 jobs in contact centers, he estimated that telemarketing accounts for roughly 13,500.
Not all of those are affected, since the new French regime does not ban all commercial phone contact but mainly conditions B2C prospecting on prior consent. On that basis, he put directly exposed jobs at 10,000 at most, part of which could continue on opt-in campaigns or be redeployed.
Outsourcia redeployed all of its roughly 150 affected staff and expects a net gain of about 300 jobs this year, with around 80% of the sector’s activity and jobs concentrated in large, diversified outsourcers.
Still, Saoud cautioned that the threat extends beyond canvassing, as automation begins to touch tasks inside even the largest groups.
