Concentrix, the American customer-experience outsourcer, disclosed the loss of a further client service during consultation at its A Coruna site in Galicia, raising the second redundancy round there to as many as 160 jobs.1 Unions ratified the first round of 80 posts in July, so the site stands to lose twice what was agreed six weeks ago.
Spanish law routes collective dismissals through an expediente de regulacion de empleo (ERE), a compulsory consultation with worker representatives that must run before any dismissal takes effect. The ERE fixes who is dismissed, on what terms and with what compensation, and it gives the workforce a seat at the table with its employer. It reaches the employer and nobody else.
That boundary is the whole difficulty here. Unions name Microsoft's push of customer support towards AI self-service as the reason the contracted work disappeared. Microsoft is not a party to the consultation, has no obligation to appear, and owes Spanish labour authorities no explanation for a product decision taken in Redmond. The outsourcer that must answer for the redundancies did not make the decision that caused them, and the firm that made it faces no Spanish process at all.
Outsourced customer service is where this pattern will keep surfacing, because the industry exists to hold employment risk on somebody else's balance sheet. A client can withdraw a service line by email; the vendor then runs a statutory consultation, pays statutory compensation and absorbs the reputational damage. Any European rule intending to reach AI-driven displacement in this sector will have to bind the buyer of the service rather than the seller of the labour, and no instrument in force does that today.
