This paper brings research results on workers of a call center, in Porto Alegre, trying to analyze combinedly how one works and who works in telemarketing activities. Call centers are business organizations of telemarketing services. Their operators are workers with high education, compared to Brazilian job market levels, what would point to a professionalization of the activity. Paradoxically, work conditions, characterized by the intensification of labor and low remuneration, but with a demand of medium qualification, influence the strategies and the senses of this job for young workers, defining this as "trampoline job", that just answers to a transitory superation of material and symbolic conditions, and not the search for professionalization and stability, even with the demands of specialized technical knowledge and constant recycling. The characteristics of the sector and the emergency of this new type of worker help to understand labor in the services sector.
Sociology of labor; call centers, Porto Alegre; social and occupational profile of workers; job rotation; services
