Elon Musk doesn’t like people working from home. A year ago he declared the end remote work For employees of the automaker Tesla.
He now calls the desire to work from a “laptop-class” home “immoral.”
“Are you going to work from home and have everyone else who builds your car come to the factory?” he said in an interview. on the US news network CNBC:
This is a productivity issue, but it’s also a moral issue. People should get off the fucking moral lofty horse of working from home. Because they are asking others not to work from home while they are working from home.
There is superficial logic to Mr. Musk’s position. But upon closer inspection, the argument falls apart. We are obligated to share our workload with others, but we are not obligated to suffer for no reason. And for most of human history, working from home was the norm. Strange are modern factories and offices.
Telecommuting and the Industrial Revolution
Before the Industrial Revolution, which historians date back to the mid-1700s and mid-1800s, working from home, or working close to home, was the norm for most of the world’s population. This included skilled manufacturing workers who usually worked from their homes or small workshops nearby.
For skilled craftsmen, working hours were, so to speak, ‘flexible’.British historian EP Thompson Records Shock among the upper classes over the notorious “irregularities” of labor.
The situation changed with the rapid growth and concentration of machinery in the Industrial Revolution. These changes began in England, where some of the most protracted and tense disputes were witnessed over the new working hours and discipline demanded by factory owners and operators.
Judgments about the conditions of pre-industrial workers vary.Thompson’s Masterpiece Study The origins of the British working class (published in 1963) tells the dark story of a family of six or eight woolcombers who worked clustered around a charcoal stove whose workshop was “a bedroom”.
But the article does not mention a sock shop with “peas and beans in a cozy garden and plenty of humming ale” and Belfast’s linen weaving district with “whitewashed houses and little flower gardens”. is also mentioned.
In any case, telecommuting is not a new invention of “laptop class”. Only the Industrial Revolution required workers to work under one roof for a set number of hours.
misapply the concept of justice
Musk’s moral argument against working from home is that not all workers can work from home, so no one should be expected to do so.
This is similar to the “categorical imperative” described by 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. “One can only act according to its maxims and hope that at the same time it becomes a universal law.”
but act according to the same principle It doesn’t mean we all have the same choices. For example, you might want all workers to have the maximum freedom in their work.
A broader mistake Mr. Musk seems to be making is misapplying what ethics researchers call distributive justice.
Simply put, distributive justice concerns how we share the benefits and harms. As the philosopher John Rawls explains in his book, justice as fairnessin distributive justice, sees society as a cooperative activity and “regulates over time the sharing of benefits arising from social cooperation”.
Research on distributive justice in the workplace is usually concerned with how workers are paid fairly and how they share the suffering or ‘toil’ that work requires. But there is no compelling moral argument for sharing the needless suffering that work creates.
![Hatters at work in the 19th century.](https://www.startupdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AdobeStock_162338229.jpeg)
Hatters at work in the 19th century. Image: Adobe Stock
How to share more fairly
It is clear that professionals profit from their work in a variety of ways that we might argue are unjustified.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith has said satirically: The Economics of Innocent FraudThe people who enjoy their jobs the most are generally paid the highest. “This is acceptable. The low pay scale is for people doing repetitive, tedious and painful work.”
If Mr. Musk wants to split either his salary or his work at Tesla more evenly, he has the means to do something about it.For example, instead of receiving a salary package, he could pay the factory workers more. likely to pay him US$56 billion (This depends on Tesla’s market cap being 12x what it was in 2018. It’s about 10x today.)
To share the “work” more fairly, he does more than just: sleeping at work. He could be on the production line or hauling out the cobalt needed for electric car batteries in mines in central Africa. for a few dollars a day.
Elon, the floor is yours
Rather, Musk’s idea of fairness is about creating unnecessary jobs and humiliating workers who don’t need to commute to the office. There is no compelling moral reason for this in the major Western ethical traditions.
The fruits and burdens of work should be fairly distributed, but unnecessary work serves no one. Commuting is the least enjoyable and most negative time of a worker’s day. According to research. Claiming that everyone must do it does no good to those who must do it. They are not better off.
It is ethically perverse to deny some workers their freedom to work from home because others do not currently have the same freedoms.
Musk’s hostility to remote work is consistent with a long history of research documenting managers’ reluctance to keep workers out of sight.
Work from home, orwork anywhere” became a topic since the 1970s, has been technically viable since at least the late 1990s. But it became an option for most workers only when managers were forced to accept it during the pandemic.
This coercive experiment of the pandemic “Enlightenmentthat working from home is just as productive, Growth of surveillance systems The tracking of employees at home proves that suspicion of management persists.
Tesla has real moral issues that Mr. Musk must grapple with. He could use his wealth and influence to do something about issues such as: Modern slavery in supply chainsor unfairness executive compensation.
Rather, he is frustrated with working from home. To truly make work at Tesla more equitable, Mr. Musk’s moral endeavor is to equitably distribute Tesla’s profits and alleviate the pain and toil already created by the industrial production system. It would be better to be directed
This article is reprinted from conversation Under Creative Commons License.read Original work.