if I wanted to covertly and nonviolently destroy a society, that is exactly the kind of thing I would propagandize said society's populace into believing—that being asked to work hard to make something good at your hard-to-attain job (that you managed to attain while thousands of others were turned away!!) working for one of the biggest and most influential social media websites in the world, is somehow "abusive", "labor theft", "toxic", etc.
telling Twitter employees to work hard and possibly for long hours at their well-paying job with apparently tons of great benefits is not the same thing as telling Industrial Revolution minimum-wage poor-working-conditions steel mill workers or whatever that they have to work 80 hours a week or get fired, yet that seems to be the lens you're viewing this through, which greatly confuses me.
I understand that you likely have a wholly different political lens in general that you view the world through, compared to myself (and most other people), but still, it's not really a gulag or concentration camp if you're being paid upwards of $100k a year (and can freely leave to find a different job if at any point you don't like the way things are going!), so any allusions in that vein are hard to take seriously.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I noticed you said:
> "and possibly for long hours"
Why did you add the word possibly? The email explicitly says "this will mean working long hours".
(I think work ethic and long hours are totally fine! But if a billionaire comes in, fires half of his staff, and then says the remaining ones need to work long hours to make his company a success... we can just acknowledge that, without softening his message.)
completely fair point, but also the email said "this will mean working long hours", not "this will mean that everyone at the company is going to be working long hours, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year", which is how everyone else seems to be taking it. I read it more as "there will be times where we will crunch" (which I know is complete blasphemy these days).
Alright then, do you currently work 14+ hour days seven days a week for your current employer or do you just like to tell other people how to work without doing the work yourself?
Because if you're working long hours and not getting proper overtime pay for those hours then yes you are being cheated out of pay. And companies bleed employees when they do things like this for a reason: Because they can get similar or better pay with better working hours. It's a worker's market right now and you better believe people are going to take advantage of it.
I'm not telling anyone how to work. that is what you are doing:
> it's effectively wage theft when a company forces you to work long grueling hours for the same rates and it steals years off of your personal life to feed the ambitions of an insane CEO.
> Perhaps instead of calling it 'hard work' you should call it what it is: Stealing.
you're explicitly stating that the standards that Elon Musk is setting for his employees, just by saying "this will mean working long hours", are unilaterally, inherently unjust.
when you work at an hourly pay rate and your boss/supervisor tells you to work more hours than usual at no additional pay, that is obviously exploitative.
salaried positions are completely different, and it is disingenuous to pretend like this is not the case. it is true that the social contract between Twitter employees and their employer is in the process of changing, but that is being made explicit to the employees, and they are being asked to either agree to the changes or leave the company.
what exactly is wrong with this?
where exactly is the "labor theft"?
> And companies bleed employees when they do things like this for a reason: Because they can get similar or better pay with better working hours. It's a worker's market right now and you better believe people are going to take advantage of it.
and that is absolutely fine! there is absolutely no reason why a Twitter employee who does not agree to the new terms put forth by their boss should stay with the company. and there's nothing compelling them to do so!
but why should those who do agree to the new terms like shamed or told their labor is being stolen or whatever, just for finding the new terms under which they receive payment in exchange for their labor to be satisfactory? the decision is wholly up to these employees to make personally, on an individual basis. anything else is "telling people how to work".
I don't get your hyperbolic angle that pushing back against Elon Musk is society destroying.
I agree that Twitter was bloated with benefits, but this was the industry's rewarding of their labor aristocrats. It's unfair against anyone who couldn't make it there (like me too) but this is how the industry retained talent so far.
Now these benefits are being taken away. This may be fair to everyone else in the industry, and this is something big tech was already looking to cut during this economic turmoil.
Now this is the real point of contention with Elon Musk. Anyone who's left after morale exhausting job cuts is going to be worked to the bone. They have been enjoying benefits that they don't have anymore, but the wider industry also does not work people this hard.
Is it fair that the best companies should work their people this hard? At the very least this may return results quickly in the short-term to pay off the debt from buying Twitter, but how sustainable is this? Amazon Warehouses are the best in delivering packages quick, but they churn through workers through harsh conditions and they are running out of a labor pool to recruit from. Would Twitter be able to retain talent in the long run? Should the entire industry be run like this?
This then gets to the broader question of the recent societal trend you have been seeing. It's really a collective response to the question of whether society is taking care of the people working for keep it going. The answer for a lot of people is that society has been taking more and more from them. Their wages largely haven't been keeping up with increases in productively. Newer generations are being less economically involved than older ones. A foreign adverse nation does not have to be involved when the nation is already rotting from the inside and people can smell it.
telling Twitter employees to work hard and possibly for long hours at their well-paying job with apparently tons of great benefits is not the same thing as telling Industrial Revolution minimum-wage poor-working-conditions steel mill workers or whatever that they have to work 80 hours a week or get fired, yet that seems to be the lens you're viewing this through, which greatly confuses me.
I understand that you likely have a wholly different political lens in general that you view the world through, compared to myself (and most other people), but still, it's not really a gulag or concentration camp if you're being paid upwards of $100k a year (and can freely leave to find a different job if at any point you don't like the way things are going!), so any allusions in that vein are hard to take seriously.