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.
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.