This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different.
But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses. They have to be in a hospital, walking into rooms and tending to patients, right? Not phone nurses and poison control center nurses. They work from home nowadays.
I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse.
But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.
From an emotional standpoint, sure, but not from a moral standpoint, which is what your previous post was saying. There is no moral case for punishing an advantaged class if that punishment does nothing to help the other class.
That said I could for see cases where the laptop class could be isolated from pain when a separate class has to do the physical work. Imagine a scenario where the laptop class engineer does some sloppy work in order to pick up the kids for soccer. The goof up requires 100 production line people to redo step 8 of 30 steps for 3 additional hours.
That goof up will be less visible there than at a company that has outsourced production line work. At the outsourced production company the goof up will show up as the additional change order which will have a directly mappable line item on the quarterly accounting that the responsible engineer will need to answer for.
Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?
I’ve never met a factory worker who resents the existence of cushy WFH jobs. On the contrary, many aspire to have such a job.
Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too?
100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.
Probably impressions matter on the factory floor and when you scale up operations. You don't want a situation where the people on the factory floor just refer to the design team as "corporate" (i.e. "corporate" wants us to do this, guys we have to redo X over again because "dude in corporate" thinks its not going to work otherwise).
Some workers have shifts, some have to work outside in the rain.
It's only fair that everyone works outside in the rain in shifts?
The challenge for Elon (and Amazon) is that his two of his companies rely on physical labor and can't outsource the physical part but still need tech talent that could WFH.
I don't envy him...
They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.
A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.
Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.
"People are getting annoyed by these implicit class differences in our organisation, what do we do?"
"Let's encode them explicitly in the contracts. Then we can blame it on the contracts and pretend it's out of our control!"
No, you've now created an even "lower" class within the company.
There are people whose jobs involve abseiling from the side of a building.
Therefore it's only fair that we should all be doing our jobs while abseiling from the side of a building.
If you think it's "unfair" that some people have to commute into work then pay them accordingly.
This could be true for Tesla, there’s no morality to this. The fact Musk brings morality in suggests he’s talking out his arse.
Twitter is a different company. If he doesn’t bring morality into it, he doesn’t have to be a hypocrite. He could easily say “working on site is necessary for Tesla, not for Twitter.” Being dogmatic is not good business.
According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”
> they’re productivity issues
Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral. Not only does Benjamin Franklin jump to mind, but the entire Protestant-informed culture of “the West”. Japan’s culture is also infused with a productivity mindset.
Right/wrong in this case are meant in the sense of "it's wrong to murder people" as opposed to "saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong." The former is a statement of morality, the latter is a statement of correctness. This does not link productivity / morality.
> Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral.
Therefore it's not an axiom. Most people would only consider it immoral if you chose to be unproductive for the sake of being unproductive. For example, refusing to do your job while expecting to be paid is something many people would consider immoral.
This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive. For example, doing something more slowly but more safely may be less productive but also something many would not consider immoral.
In the context of one's life, I agree fully. However, once you choose to work in a collective, choosing to be less productive without a positive tradeoff to the system, harms the ones around you.
I think you may have missed the issues they intended to bring up. The moral issues I see could be that you might have one class of worker ("knowledge worker") who is able to work from home and another class of worker who is unable to work from home. It's along the lines of the difference between paid catering for the executive suite but not the rest of the office.
Paid catering isn’t an intrinsic part of the work, so it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.
Here's just some of the benefits to on-site workers in role XYZ of other workers being able to WFH:
* Quicker commutes (less congestion from people needlessly traveling) and thus more free time.
* If a partner is WFH, they haven't wasted time commuting and thus have more time and energy to assist with the household.
* Higher salaries as the jobs requiring a commute become less desirable vs. WFH jobs.
* Higher salaries as the business wastes less money on having unnecessary office facilities and (theoretically at least) workers could demand these savings be reflected in their salaries.
* Improved health from reduction in pollution caused by commuting.
* Reduced cost of living from less wasted land used for offices that are only used 30% of a week.
* Lower taxes or improved government services as less money needs to be wasted on infrastructure that is overwhelmingly built to cater for the 12% per week that it is used to needlessly shuffle everyone around.
* Increased productivity from reduction in illnesses transferred on public transport and within office facilities.
* Improved happiness and productivity resulting from workers being able to setup a workspace/home office that is most productive for their needs. Fresh air, lighting, seating, etc are all controllable by the worker at home.
* Households could switch to having a single car.
If one were to debate against WFH, more sensible arguments would be things like:
* Greater heating / cooling efficiency to cram more people in a single cramped building than to have those same people heat / cool their homes individually. Passive houses largely solve this.
* More efficient access to some services such as getting a haircut, buying goods from a specialist retailer, etc if they're all centralised in a CBD as opposed to requiring individuals to travel all across a city. Increased deliveries to home negates this.
* Forced exercise (on average) due to workers needing to walk between transport options and an office building, whereas at home they don't have to walk anywhere unless they are motivated to do so.
* Larger population to recruit from, because distance to office does not matter.
* More diverse workforce, because people with some physical and/or mental disabilities, will be able to work remote.
If you watch his interview you see him say WFH is morally wrong for almost everyone in the "laptop class" and not just his companies.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-work-from-home-morall... "You're going to make people who make your food that gets delivered [that] can't work from home; the people that come fix your house, they cant work from home, but you can?"
"Does that seem morally right? That's messed up," Musk said.
He owns a car company and a space ship company - both of which have assembly lines with tons of workers. A majority of his employees will need to be working in a factory or with physical equipment/prototypes. Therefore they must be at the office or at the plant.
In that environment - allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers - the in-office class and the laptop WFH class within the same company.
Friction could be generated if for instance. the laptop class is making decisions from the comfort of their PJs which impacts the production line class. Its much easier to just make that 8% laptop class of the company RTO and experience the impact of their decisions.
Similar issues would be apparent at Amazon (distribution center workers versus AWS staff) and possibly Apple (i.e. HW Apple engineers have to be in office, but iCloud workers can WFH).
I think it'd be hard/impossible that a small cloud first company or small remote only startup like GitLabs would be amoral for being WFH.
Twitter could probably be WFH, but in order to make statement that would not possibly be construed as hypocritical he unfortunately can't make such a distinction.