{"id":33262,"date":"2022-06-02T06:50:59","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T06:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/teslas-remote-work-policy-reveals-elon-musks-big-blind-spot-quartz\/"},"modified":"2022-06-02T06:50:59","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T06:50:59","slug":"teslas-remote-work-policy-reveals-elon-musks-big-blind-spot-quartz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/teslas-remote-work-policy-reveals-elon-musks-big-blind-spot-quartz\/","title":{"rendered":"Tesla’s remote-work policy reveals Elon Musk’s big blind spot – Quartz"},"content":{"rendered":"
Elon Musk is calling Tesla executives back to the office \u2014 and using factory workers’ demanding schedules to justify his orders.<\/p>\n
The Tesla CEO sent out an email on May 31 entitled \u201cRemote work is no longer acceptble (sic)\u201d arguing for the company to succeed, executives needed to be back in Tesla’s main offices. He noted that Tesla factory workers’ schedules were more taxing than those of its white-collar workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean * minimum *) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,\u201d the electric-vehicle magnate wrote in the internal email reported by Bloomberg. “This is less than we ask of factory workers.”<\/p>\n
Musk claimed in a follow-up email that his own stints working long hours and sleeping in Tesla’s Fremont factory were the reason the automaker had escaped bankruptcy. \u201cThe more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,\u201d he wrote. “That is why I lived in the factory so much \u2014 so that those on the line could see me working alongside them.”<\/p>\n
It’s true that Tesla factory workers have been known to log arduous hours. During Shanghai’s lockdown, Tesla workers reportedly pulled 12-hours shifts, six days a week, sleeping first in factories and later in makeshift dorm rooms. Tesla factory workers in the US have also been told to work 12-hour, six-day-a-week shifts during production ramp-ups.<\/p>\n
But as a reason to reject remote work, grueling factory schedules are not a compelling argument. (Tesla’s stock is six times higher today than at the start of the pandemic when the company embraced remote work.) The more relevant question isn’t whether Tesla executives are doing too little, but whether Tesla pushes factory workers to do too much.<\/p>\n
Tesla has repeatedly come under criticism for its treatment of workers in its factories.<\/p>\n
In May 2020, Musk reopened Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California, defying government stay-at-home orders and, critics say, endangering factory workers’ health. The Tesla plant had about 450 reported covid cases among its roughly 10,000 workers between May and December 2020. Several factory workers also said that they’d been fired for declining to come into work because of health concerns, despite Tesla’s assurances that they were not obligated to do so during the early months of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
Musk’s lofty production goals at Tesla were also tied to illness and on-the-job injuries among factory workers, according to a 2017 investigation by The Guardian. While Tesla responded that it had made a number of changes aimed at improving safety conditions, it subsequently failed to report hundreds of injuries at the Fremont plant, according to California’s workplace health and safety regulator.<\/p>\n