Elon Musk was supposed to be one of the new type of leaders in the workplace.
It turns out he’s just one of the old type of authoritarian bosses.
I wasn’t at all surprised to read that Musk was laying off a large number of employees after taking control of Twitter. The fact is, unless a business is failing, a change of ownership is rarely good for the people who work there.
But I was appalled to see on the BBC today that Musk is telling his remaining employees that they will no longer be allowed to work from home, that he excepts them to be in the office working for at least 40 hours a week.
When I went to work at a Southern California newspaper in 1990, my job was all about remote work. I was hired to cover college and professional sports in Los Angeles. Most days what that meant was covering events and writing on deadline about them. The only time I went to the office was to pick up my paycheck in the days before direct deposit.
There were significant parts of the year when seasons overlapped. Starting in July, I covered Los Angeles Rams training camp in the afternoons and then went to Dodger Stadium in the evenings to cover baseball games. They never saw me in the office, but I worked 60-70 hours a week.
In fact, I was working so hard covering two assignments a day that one of my coworkers complained that if I did it, our bosses would expect them to do it too.
Two years later, I got a new boss. One of the first things he said was that if he didn’t see reporters in the office every day, he didn’t think they were working.
It may have been the stupidest thing I ever heard.
It’s one thing to exert control over people if their job is essentially passive and depends on them following orders. If they need to run the grill at McDonald’s, they obviously have to be there. But in jobs that require creativity and/or aggressiveness, the last thing you want to do is make them more passive.
But that’s our world. Those who have the gold make the rules.
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ADIOS, KLANNIE OAKLEY?: Nothing is definite yet, but it appears that Lauren Boebert, the poor man’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, may not have lost her seat in Congress. With nearly all the votes in, Boebert apparently was 64 votes behind her Democratic opponent.
The latest count shows her 433 votes ahead of Adam Frisch, which is still an awfully close race for more than 315,000 votes cast.
Apparently we might have to be satisfied with Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina being the only Trumpanzee lunatic losing this year.
Oh well.
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HERE COMES NICOLE: There was a hurricane several weeks ago — I’ve forgotten the name — that reached Category 5 and never left one drop of rain here in north central Georgia. In fact, it was the first big hurricane I remember that we didn’t get any rain from since we’ve been living here.
Yet this week’s storm barely achieved hurricane status and since hitting land on the east coast of Florida has actually dropped back to tropical storm status. We’re already getting some rain and we’re expected to get an inch and a half more in the next 24 hours.
And of course, the name is one very close to my heart … Nicole.