Reasons Elon Musk Eliminated Remote Work Because Working From Home “Does Not Work”
Chief executives believe that working from home results in fewer engaged and less productive employees in an effort to get staff back to the office.
However, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, goes a step further and declares the practice to be “morally wrong” in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday night.
Musk contended that IT workers, whom he referred to as the “laptop class,”
were being unjust in their demands for perks that others, such as service
or factory workers, were unable to enjoy.
“You intend to work from home, and you intend to require everyone else involved in the production of your car to report to the factory?
Are you going to forbid the producers of your delivered food from working remotely? Asked Musk. “Seems that to be morally correct?”
People need to drop their damned moral high horses.
Bullshit about working from home, high horse,”
he remarked. “They’re asking everyone else not to work from home while they do.”
White-collar workers were able to hunker down while workers deemed
essential — often lower-income or members of minority populations — had
to venture outdoors to go to work under the U.S.’s stay-at-home orders in
the early days of the COVID outbreak. In industries like the meatpacking
industry, where working from home was not feasible, in-person work
occasionally resulted in COVID outbreaks.
Musk has a history of being critical of remote employment.
Even when other businesses cautiously tried — and frequently failed — to
bring personnel back to the office just a few days a week in June,
the Tesla CEO ordered staff back to the office full-time. Musk mentioned
equity in an internal communication, it was said that 40 hours per week
was “less than [what] we ask of factory workers.” (Musk also made fun of
Apple employees who choose not to report to work at the time on Twitter.)
In one of his first moves as the CEO of the social media business,
Musk also reversed Twitter’s permanent remote work policy in November.
However, he eventually modified his expectations when more staff members than anticipated were eager to leave over the issue.
While U.S. workers “are trying to avoid going to work at all,” Tesla’s CEO
commended those who worked past regular hours, applauding workers in
the company’s Shanghai facility for “burning the 3:00 a.m. oil” in a statement.
in a May 2016 interview. In the middle of China’s strict COVID prevention program,
Tesla’s Shanghai manufacturing at the time used a “closed-loop” approach,
with employees sleeping and eating there to avoid production interruptions brought on by an epidemic.
