The fruits and burdens of work should be distributed fairly, but unnecessary work helps no one.
Commuting is the least pleasurable, and most negative, time of a workers’ day, studies show. Insisting everyone has to do it brings no benefit to those who must do it. They’re not better off.
Denying some workers’ freedom to work from home because other workers don’t have the same freedom now is ethically perverse.
Musk’s hostility towards remote work is consistent with a long history of research that documents managers’ resistance to letting workers out of their sight.
Working from home, or “anywhere working”, has been discussed since the 1970s, and technologically viable since at least the late 1990s. Yet it only became an option for most workers when managers were forced to accept it during the pandemic.
While this enforced experiment of the pandemic has led to the “epiphany” that working from home can be as productive, the growth of surveillance systems to track workers at home proves managerial suspicions linger.
There are genuine moral issues for Musk to grapple with at Tesla. He could use his fortune and influence to do something about issues such as modern slavery in supply chains, or the inequity of executive pay.
Instead, he’s vexed about working from home. To make work at Tesla genuinely more just, Musk’s moral effort would better be directed towards fairly distributing Tesla’s profit, and mitigating the suffering and toil that industrial production systems already create.
Dale Tweedie is a senior lecturer in Macquarie University’s Department of Accounting and Corporate Governance. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
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