(RepublicanInformer.com)- Tesla employees will be forced to return to an office to work in-person, where they must work at least 40 hours each week. If they don’t, they’ll be fired from their positions.
That information was leaked from a series of emails that the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, sent to employees on Tuesday. It was first reported by Electrek, a news site dedicated to the electric car industry.
According to the outlet, Musk wrote in the emails:
“Anyone 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. This is less than we ask of factory workers.”
All employees must work in a “main Tesla office, not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties.”
Anyone who wishes to apply for an exemption from the policy would need to get the approval from Musk directly, he said. He also added:
“If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned. Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in.”
NPR reached out to Tesla to get an official response from the company, but that request was not returned. Instead, Musk took to Twitter to respond to people who had reached out to him about his policy and those leaked emails. His response was:
“They should pretend to work somewhere else.”
This policy at Tesla would go against what a lot of major companies are doing, in the age of the pandemic. In fact, the social media company that Musk is working to purchase, Twitter, announced last year that it would allow employees to work remotely forever if they wanted to.
It remains to be seen whether Twitter would keep that policy if Musk were to end up taking over the social media giant.
Musk’s stance against remote work shouldn’t be all that surprising. He has often criticized the work ethic of Americans in the past. In fact, as part of an interview he gave with Financial Times, he said Americans were just trying to “avoid going to work at all.”
He compared factory workers in China who he said work hard and “won’t even leave the factory.”
On the whole, it’s unlikely that Musk is going to gain many public supporters with his comments. Much of the mainstream workplace is going virtual, after realizing during the pandemic that it wasn’t impossible to get work done that way — and the fact that more and more employees seem to prefer at least a flexible work week, if not a fully remote one.
That idea simply doesn’t fly with Musk, though, who seems to favor an old-school way of conducting business. It’s hard to argue with Musk’s success in business, but this certainly isn’t going to gain him any public fans.
That being said, Musk hasn’t really cared at all in the past about what the general public thinks of him.
