Altice Docks SNS 24 Operators' Pay for Bathroom and Snack Breaks

Operators who staff SNS 24, the round-the-clock telephone line of Portugal's Serviço Nacional de Saúde (National Health Service, or SNS), say they lose part of their wages every time they step away from their station to use the toilet, eat a snack or simply pause to rest. The complaint was reported on 26 June by Observador and the Jornal de Notícias (Journal of News), based on accounts from several workers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

SNS 24 is one of the largest front doors into the public health system, fielding triage calls that decide whether a patient should stay home, visit a health centre or go to hospital. Yet the people answering those calls — most of them nurses — are not employed by the SNS at all. They work under contract to Altice, the telecommunications group that runs the service, and they do so as independent contractors on the recibos verdes (green receipts) basis, formally a contrato de prestação de serviços (service-provision contract).

Under that model, the operators say, only time spent actively logged in and taking calls counts towards their pay. Trips to the bathroom, meal breaks and brief rest pauses are deducted. The practical result, according to the workers, is that they go "seven or eight hours straight" without using the toilet if they want to keep a full day's earnings. Several described the arrangement as precarious and "unsustainable."

Because they are classified as service providers rather than employees, the operators say they are entitled to none of the protections that come with a labour contract. They have no paid holidays, no holiday or meal subsidies, and — crucially — no legal right to strike, leaving them with little collective leverage to challenge the terms.

Contacted about the unpaid breaks, Altice did not respond to the specific allegations but said the workers are independent professionals who "carry out this activity under a service-provision regime." The company has used the same framing before to distinguish the contractors from its own staff.

The episode lands at a sensitive moment. Parliament has been wrestling for weeks with the government's labour-law package, much of it focused on curbing outsourcing and precarious contracts, and the working conditions behind a flagship public-health service hand critics a vivid example. For the public, the immediate concern is quieter but no less real: a triage line whose staff feel pressed to stay glued to their headsets is a line whose quality depends on people working under strain.

No government department or health regulator had publicly responded to the reports by the afternoon of 26 June. For now, the workers' accounts stand as a reminder that the SNS increasingly leans on contracted intermediaries — and that the terms of those contracts shape the care patients receive on the other end of the line.