The Paradox of Elon Musk – The Futurist Entrepreneur Remains Stuck in the Values of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Elon Musk raises real issues about telecommuting, but to serve his interests at Tesla first.
Not a day goes by without Elon Musk trying to create a buzz in one way or another. One day he's promoting a cryptocurrency on Twitter, the next he's announcing that he wants to buy Twitter to make it the world champion of free speech.
And then, on another day, he's issuing an ultimatum to Tesla employees about returning to the company's offices. Telecommuting? Ok for Elon Musk, but only once Tesla employees have worked at least 40 hours in a week at Tesla's premises.
The email sent by Elon Musk to Tesla employees is very surprising from an entrepreneur who wants to be futuristic in everything he does:
Elon Musk wants to be futuristic, but he keeps relying on values from the past
Elon Musk never stops talking about the future and projecting himself into the future, but he does so with a value system straight out of the 19th and 20th centuries. He constantly evokes the notion of progress, this 19th-century ideal that is now largely discredited, notably by the ecological crisis.
As for his dream of space conquest, it is heir to a 19th-century ideology - colonization - and 20th-century imagery: Kennedy, the Cold War, etc...
When Musk talks about telecommuting, we have the impression of hearing an old industry boss: he is essentially concerned with the productivity of his employees - productivity that he associates with their presence and supervision. Not to mention his conception of working hours, which takes us back to the Taylor years, since he mentions a minimum presence on site of forty hours per week.
Listening to Elon Musk, the first problem he seems to have with telecommuting is productivity, since Tesla has done poorly in the first half of the year. That's the starting point of his email to Tesla employees. But then he raises the question of creativity and innovation, which I don't think we have enough time to answer clearly.
It is indeed on this subject that remote work could become problematic.
Simply because, when the group is no longer together, ideas circulate less. Telework is particularly well suited to scheduled, repetitive, and highly supervised tasks. On the other hand, when it comes to breaking out of protocol, face-to-face meetings become necessary. So he is putting his finger on an important issue that companies who are planning to make telework widespread would do well to address.
To defend his interests, Elon Musk puts forward a real issue: that of inequalities between workers
To defend his point, Elon Musk is very clever. He puts forward a very pertinent argument on the fact that workers cannot telecommute, and therefore that this practice would institute a breach of equality with executives.
It is indeed surprising that politicians have not taken more notice of this issue in the last two years. Telework is a social gain that was won without a struggle: it was the Covid-19 crisis that made it widespread and imposed it, without anyone having demanded it.
It then became established, like all the transformations of our daily life linked to technological innovations.
Telework is now considered by those who practice it as an irreversible achievement. This is problematic for several reasons. There has been no collective debate and no clear will of the employees themselves to obtain this achievement. Regrettably, trade unions and employees do not try harder to reflect collectively on the positive, and also the negative aspects of telework.
Because there are negative aspects, notably the one mentioned by Musk: this practice adds to existing inequalities - in terms of salary, arduousness, tasks - a new inequality between those who can telework, with all the individual benefits that this generates (better time management, greater flexibility in schedules) and those who do not have access to it.
As it happens, the majority of those who have access to it is managers, up to 70%. Workers do not have access to it, as Musk says, and this is also the case for those who are called, since Covid, the first and second line workers: farmers, health care workers, maintenance workers, etc.
Although he seeks above all to serve his interests with his media outing, Elon Musk raises interesting points, although he is in the middle of a paradox.
Telecommuting is an integral part of the Great Resignation issue
In addition to the indifference between the professional and private spheres that telework induces, a big risk is the “derealization” of existence caused by telework. It seems to me that, by removing the routines of working in a fixed place, telework contributes to a kind of devaluation of work as a way of relating to the world.
It is as if those who experiment with telework gradually begin to dream of a life without constraints, “liberated” from work in a way. This is part of a wider movement - I am thinking of the vogue for so-called self-employment, or the Great Resignation phenomenon that followed COVID-19 in the United States, for example. A phenomenon that is spreading worldwide, with 1 in 5 employees thinking of quitting in the next 12 months, according to a study by the auditing firm PwC.
Of course, work can be a place of exploitation, alienation, and suffering - without even going back to the structural mechanisms of capitalism, the emergence of burn-out bears witness to this.
Nevertheless, too many people seem to tend to forget that work is also a structuring mode of action from an existential, social and political point of view. Rather than this generalized “Get out!, Run!”, we would all do well to consider the purpose of our work and the conditions in which we want to do it. The goal is to find a job that brings us greater personal fulfillment and better working and salary conditions.
In short, we find there all the sense of the Great Resignation movement.
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