If you’re looking for a job that allows you to work from home, it may not be any of the companies owned by Elon Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the man who recently took control of Twitter, said that work from home was a moral issue and that he prefers that his employees be at office, even if it isn’t for the entire 40 hours in a work week.

“I am a big believer that people are more productive when they are in person,” Musk said in an exclusive interview with CNBC, right after the annual meeting of Tesla shareholders. “It’s a bit like the fake Marie Anotoinette quote ‘let them eat cake’. Really, you’re gonna work from home? And you’re gonna make everyone else who made your car come work at the factory? The people who make your food that gets delivered, they can’t work from home? The people who fix your house, they can’t work from home but you can? Does that seem morally right? It’s messed up” he added.

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Musk is not the first, and will not be the last executive of a big organisation who wants people to turn up to office. Work-from-home for most people in white collar jobs became a preferred model during the pandemic, which allowed businesses to keep running amidst the necessary lockdowns that were aimed at preventing the COVID-19 virus from spreading. But a lot of the workforce that can deliver its work from the comfort of their home prefer not going to the office.

Even in India, work from home reduced sharply before the end of 2022. By October last year, more than 70 percent of the companies in India had moved into a hybrid model, which means employees need to turn up at the office at least a few times a week. In January 2022, more than half of the jobs were still being done remotely. However, as companies started calling people back to work, resignations spiked.

While studies have shown that productivity declined when people worked from home, Musk’s bid to make WFH a moral argument may be worth debating. A survey of over 10,000 skilled professionals at HCL Technologies, a $35-billion Mumbai-based software services provider, showed that “hours worked increased, output declined slightly, and productivity fell 8 percent–19 percent,” according to a study published in the University of Chicago press journals in February 2023.

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That few people have access to many comforts while others don’t is a fact within capitalist societies. Some people have supercars, yachts and private jets and others have to take public transport and wait in queues. Is that something that a billionaire like Elon Musk — with a net worth of nearly $176 billion on May 17, according to the latest Forbes data — would consider unfair?

Would he disagree that work-from-home is a privilege earned by a section of the working class for the efforts that they put into picking up the skills for a job that they could deliver from, a beach in Maldives?

It isn’t the case that people picked a degree or a line of work hoping to work from home, at least not the ones who entered the workforce before the pandemic. How’s the turn of fortunes for a middle-class engineer more reprehensible than that of, an oil producer or a car manufacturer who can cite supply constraints to jack up prices the best s/he can?

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Musk made an example of himself by saying that he works seven days a week (with six hours of sleep) and that, in any given year, there are only two to three days where he isn’t putting in any amount of work related to his businesses. While he encouraged his employees to take their weekly offs and vacations, he was fairly vociferous in condemning the calls for continued work-from-home for certain roles. He even called it “bull shit” during the interview.

While Musk’s argument that work-from-home hampers productivity may hold water, do you agree that it is unfair that some people get to work from home and others don’t? Share your opinion and tag CNBC-TV18’s official twitter handle or drop a comment on our LinkedIn page and let us know your thoughts.

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First Published:May 17, 2023 6:09 AM IST