(123rf)

There have been 80,368 calls made with possibly malicious intent to the 120 Dasan Seoul Call Center from 2020 to October this year, the state-run foundation for the city's official information service said during a conference on Wednesday.

The 120 Dasan Call Foundation hosted a seminar on the emotional labor of call center workers at the Seoul City Hall, during which it revealed the statistics related to problematic complaints or calls made to the call center. It defined malicious petitions as ones that have no clear purpose or involve verbal and sexual abuse, which could be subject to criminal punishment.

The number of such calls made to the 120 hotline surpassed 10,000 every year from 2020 to 2023: 14,879 in 2020, 22,780 in 2021, 24,295 in 2022, 12,779 in 2023 and 5,635 from January to October 2024.

Of those, legal actions have been sought for against 35 cases.

In one particular case, a petitioner called the Dasan Call Center 1,147 times from 2010 to 2023. The petitioner issued complaints such as being bitten by a mosquito inside the home or the neighbor's dog barking, subjecting the responding employees to profanity and sexual harassment, while complaining for 100 consecutive minutes in one instance.

Call center agents are among those whose work involves a high degree of emotional labor, referring to having to manage feelings and emotions during interactions during interactions with customers to meet the requirements of the job. Roles requiring emotional labor are common in the service economy, such as telemarketers, flight attendants and bank tellers, among many others.

According to the foundation, 11.72 million of Korea's workforce is estimated to be an emotional laborer.

The organization said that it will create a manual for the Dasan Call Center employees, which will address protection of the call center agents and proper responses to malicious complaints and petitions.