Elon Musk doesn’t like people working from home. A year ago he declared the end of remote work for employees at car maker Tesla. Now he has called the desire of the “laptop classes” to work from home “immoral”.
“You’re gonna work from home and you’re gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory?” he said in an interview on US news network CNBC: It’s a productivity issue, but it’s also a moral issue. People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with that work-from-home bullshit. Because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.
There’s a superficial logic to Musk’s position. But scrutinise it closer and the argument falls apart. While we have a duty to share workload with others, we have no duty to suffer for no reason. And for most of human history, working from home has been normal. It’s the modern factory and office that are the oddities.
Working from home and the industrial revolution
Prior to the industrial revolution, which historian date to the mid-1700s to mid-1800s, working from home, or close to home, was commonplace for most of the world’s population. This included skilled manufacturing workers, who typically worked at home or in small workshops nearby.
For the skilled craftsperson, work hours were what we might call “flexible”. British historian E.P. Thompson records the consternation among the upper class about the notorious “irregularity” of labour.
Conditions changed with the rapid growth and concentration of machines in the industrial revolution. These changes began in England, which also saw the most protracted and tense conflicts over the new work hours and discipline factory owners and managers demanded.
Judgements of conditions for workers prior to industrialisation vary. Thompson’s masterpiece study The Making of the English Working Class (published in 1963) recounts bleak tales of families of six or eight woolcombers, huddled working around a charcoal stove, their workshop “also the bedroom”.
But it also mentions the stocking maker with “peas and beans in his snug garden, and a good barrel of humming ale”, and the linen-weaving quarter of Belfast, with “their whitewashed houses, and little flower gardens”.
Either way, working from home is not a novel invention of the “laptop classes”. Only with the industrial revolution were workers required under one roof and for fixed hours.
Misapplying a concept of justice Musk’s moral argument against working from home says that because not all workers can do it, no workers should expect it.
This has some resemblance to the “categorical imperative” articulated by 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But acting according to the same principle does not mean we all have the same options. We can, for example, want all workers to have the maximum freedom their tasks allow.
The wider error Musk appears to be making is misapplying what ethics researchers call distributive justice.
Simply put, distributive justice concerns how we share benefits and harms. As the philosopher John Rawls explains in his book Justice as Fairness, in distributive justice we view society as a cooperative activity, where we “regulate the division of advantages that arises from social cooperation over time”.
Research on distributive justice at work typically concerns how to pay workers fairly and also share the suffering or “toil” work requires. But there is no compelling moral case to share the needless suffering that work creates.
How to share more fairly
Clearly, professionals benefit from work in many ways we might argue are unjust. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed satirically in The Economics of Innocent Fraud, those who most enjoy their work are generally the best paid. “This is accepted. Low wage scales are for those in repetitive, tedious, painful toil.” If Musk wanted to share either the pay or toil at Tesla more equally, he has the means to do something about it. He could pay his factory workers more, for example, instead of taking a pay package likely to pay him US$56 billion in 2028. (This depends on Tesla’s market capitalisation being 12 times what it was in 2018; it’s now about 10 times.) To share the “toil” of work more fairly, he wouldn’t just be sleeping at work. He’d be on the production line, or down a mine in central Africa, dragging out the cobalt electric vehicle batteries need, for a few dollars a day.
Elon, the floor is yours Instead, Musk’s idea of fairness is about creating unnecessary work, shaming workers who don’t need to be in the office to commute regardless. There is no compelling moral reason for this in the main Western ethics traditions.
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.
The Conversation
Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Telegraph Online staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.
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‘Femme Flex Friday’ Looks Back at the History of Bodybuilding Muscle & Fitness
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Do you wake up with a wide smile, excited about the long work commute, the micromanaging boss, the fake smiles, the extra hours without overtime pay, the … ?
Thought so.
Don’t miss
Many Americans belong to this workplace club, though they’d definitely rather not. In fact, the disengagement Americans feel about their jobs is only getting worse, recent studies show.
To be fair, engagement wasn’t great before the pandemic struck: Just 36% of full-time and part-time employees described themselves as fully engaged in 2020, according to Gallup’s latest Employee Engagement Survey. But since then, the figure dropped to 34% in 2021 and dipped again to 32% in 2022.
So consider the numbers — and look around. Chances are two or three people in your cubicle forest or on that video call have lost any sense of purpose and/or excitement about what they do.
Now, look at your boss. Maybe them, too.
What’s driving this growing disengagement? Some believe that rising levels of remote or hybrid work could be responsible. But it’s a little more nuanced than that.
Remote work and remotely invested employees
Three years after the global workforce was forced to experiment with mass remote options, there’s enough data to reveal its impact on work culture.
So far the results are mixed.
Last year, a study conducted by Tracking Happiness found that remote employees were roughly 20% happier. Yet other reports suggest that the bosses disagree. Studies by Microsoft and Citrix revealed a “productivity paranoia”; that is, “leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”
In other words, too many bosses miss the days of peering over the cubicle wall at employees they treat like cookie-jar kids who can’t be trusted. And they wonder why their charges feel no sense of engagement: more hours, more meetings, more activity and yet, less faith.
Meanwhile, workers with a remote-capable job — yet forced to be fully on-site — saw the biggest engagement drop during this period: a five-point plunge, coupled with a seven-point surge since 2019. You’ve no doubt heard of “quiet quitting” by now, another term for the phenomenon; it’s a story that, if you will, refuses to quit.
Put simply, disengagement is rising across the board. Engagement declined for all types of employees — remote, hybrid and on-site — from 2019 to 2022. That noted, forcing people to report to the office when they truly don’t need to puts an even bigger dent in worker enthusiasm.
Fortunately, this wave of disillusionment is disproportionately spread across the American workforce. Some employers enjoy much better engagement and their best practices can be replicated by others to revive workplace enthusiasm in 2023, Gallup found.
Read more: Here’s how much money the average middle-class American household makes — how do you stack up?
Four office keys: How to revive enthusiasm
Winners of Gallup’s 2022 Exceptional Workplace Award saw 70% employee engagement on average. That’s more than double the rate of the national average. Surprisingly, these organizations reported similar levels of employee engagement — even during “disruptive times.”
These top performers shared four key elements:
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A values-based culture, which results in decisions based on clearly communicated guidelines
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Flexible work locations that offer employees remote or hybrid options
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A focus on employee well-being that was clearly connected to higher performance
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Giving managers the right tools to help employees understand and embrace the organization’s culture.
Bottom line: if you feel disengaged at work, maybe it’s not so much location, location, location as your organization.
Every company is different. See if you can find an ally or start a positive conversation with an open-minded supervisor. It could begin with something as simple as peering over her cubicle wall.
What to read next
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
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Happy Frediversary
In 2017, there were strong signs of a Google algorithm ranking update that had actually started on March 7.
At first, it seemed to be a spam algorithm update related to links. However, a later Search Engine Land analysis of Fred indicated that the update targeted low-value content sites that put revenue above helping their users – and that many affected sites saw up to a 90% drop in traffic.
Many called this the Fred Update, which came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who had jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It stuck with this update.
Illyes wouldn’t confirm Fred until SMX West on March 23, when he said the update targeted specific techniques that were well-documented within the Google webmaster guidelines. Though he didn’t elaborate on which guidelines specifically were targeted by the Fred update.
Read about it in New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world.
Also on this day
How Google search personalization works: Professors and politicians just don’t understand
2022: Google has told us how search works. We know plenty about how it works. But a professor seemed confused about search personalization.
Google Hotel search showing free listings in results
2021: Google opened the door to more hotels by offering free hotel listings, separate from paid results.
Google My Business tells businesses affected by the coronavirus to update listings
2020: You could update your business hours, description, phone number and even add Google Posts.
Google people also ask boxes not showing as often now?
2020: RankRanger said the people also ask was showing for 40% of queries, down from 52% of queries.
Google Search is showing YouTube Music links on album queries
2020: On mobile, the link appeared in the “Listen” carousel of streaming music services; on desktop, it appeared within a list of streaming services in the album’s knowledge panel.
Reddit’s new ‘Trending Takeover’ ad unit lets brands appear on top of Popular feed, Search tab
2020: The ad unit had a campaign life of 24 hours and was designed to align brands with the most popular and relevant trends of the day.
Video: Fili Wiese, an SEO that used to work in Google search quality
2020: A number of topics were discussed, including managing Google penalties, how Google penalizes websites, the disavow link tool and nofollow link attribute.
Google My Business adds ‘women-led’ icon & attribute to business listings
2018: After adding the attribute, a “women-led” icon would appear in the business attributes section of their business listing.
Google tests showing answers under ‘people also ask’ feature
2018: Instead of just showing additional questions people might ask around a query you entered into the search results, Google was testing showing a snippet of the answer directly below the question.
Search in Pics: Craig Newmark at Google, Snow at NYC office & Women @ Google cupcake
2018: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Google adds emoji & GIF suggestions, translations & more to GBoard for Android
2017: Android users gained access to emoji and GIF suggestions as they typed and the ability to share GIFs in supported apps.
RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
2016: While Google would remove PageRank scores from public view in the coming weeks, the way those scores dramatically reshaped the web remained.
Google begins massive migrations of their blogs from blogspot.com to googleblog.com
2016: The reason: to help users understand that these were official blogs managed and operated by Google.
Destinations on Google delivers new travel planning experience for mobile users
2016: A mobile search for a continent, country or state, along with the word “destination” or “vacation,” would return a series of travel options.
Google Says They May Flag Broken Security Certificates In The Search Results
2015: Google’s Gary Illyes also said that Google was working on possibly boosting the ranking of secure login pages even more than they did with the normal HTTPS ranking boost.
EU Settlement Nearly Done, Google Antitrust Drama Shifts To India
2014: The Competition Commission of India (CCI) had the power to impose a fine of up 10% annual revenues, averaged over a three year period.
Bad Merchant? Google May Drop Your Rankings Later This Year
2013: Google didn’t want low-quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.
“Trulia Suggests” Search Results Without Searching
2013: Trulia Suggests took a range of data from users’ interactions with the site and to offer personalized home recommendations.
Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion
2012: Even though personalized search had been the norm at Google for over two years and at Bing for just over a year.
Search In Pics: Google Fish, Yahoo 17th Birthday & Googlighting Tie
2012: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Federal Appeals Court Allows Keyword Bidding On Competitor’s Names
2011: A California federal court ruled that it is allowed to bid on a competitor’s name for search ads.
Microsoft AdCenter Intros Quality Score That Mimics Google’s
2011: Microsoft said scores wouldn’t directly influence how ads were ranked – it was more of a reflection of how well the ads were performing in the marketplace.
Blekko Blocks More “Spam” Domains: 1.1 Million Of Them
2011: Search engine was using a new system it called “AdSpam.”
Twitter Awareness At 92%, But Usage Just A Fraction Of That
2011: Research suggested that most Americans were well aware of Twitter … they just weren’t using it.
Search Technology Behind iPad Magazine “Zite”
2011: The iPad app used the same search and machine learning capabilities developed by Worio to create a personalized magazine that got “smarter” as you used it.
Twitter Gets Its Own URL Shortener To Stop Scams; Good Marketers Need Not Fear
2010: Twitter: “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter.”
New MSN Out Of Beta, Driving Nearly 50 Percent Of Bing Queries
2010: Microsoft formally launched its much improved MSN portal.
Math Engines: For Multiplying Mixed Fractions, It’s Wolfram Alpha Over Google & Bing
2010: Wolfram Alpha proved useful for the multiplication of fractions.
Google Image Search Adds “Exact Size” Advanced Search Option
2009: Google Image search added an option to the advanced search page to enter in the exact image size you are looking for.
Google Searching For Energy Solutions Because “It’s The Right Thing To Do”
2009: “It’s also good for our business because we’re in the information business. And a lot of the energy solutions involve a lot of information…”
California State Legislator Wants To Limit Info On Maps To Block Terrorists
2009: Satellite images of schools, places of worship, government buildings and medical facilities would need to be blurred.
Former Yahoo Engineer Charged As Alleged Terrorist In India
2009: He was allegedly the “media chief” of the Indian Mujahideen, a terror group charged with the September 2008 bombings in Delhi.
Stealth Tour Of Google Audio’s Dallas Office
2007: Documenting an undercover tour of a Google office in Dallas, Texas that appeared to be the new home of the Google Audio group.
Google Asked To Remove “Mount Hitler” From Google Maps
2007: Google Germany called this a “technical accident.”
Former Microsoft Search Chief Bill Bliss On Early Search Missteps
2007: “Microsoft could have been the one to buy Inktomi and Overture instead of Yahoo, and the world would be much different now for both companies.”
Revamped My Yahoo Launches Amid Intensifying Competition
2007: There were a number of improvements and upgrades.
Nokia Jumps Into Mobile Ads With “Nokia Ad Service” Program
2007: Plus a “white label” Nokia Advertising Connector a program for others who want to run mobile ad programs.
UFO Crawler: The Truth Is Out There & Searchable
2007: IBM and Yahoo teamed up on UFOCrawler, a search engine about finding sources on “UFO Sightings, time travel, conspiracy theories and anomalies.”
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< March 8 | Search Marketing History | March 10 >
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