Elon Musk is the boss.
No apologies, no compromise.
Elon Musk is a general in the war to reclaim authority in corporate America. It had been slipping away from owners and toward managers and skilled employees. He is tilting the balance of corporate power back. Workers had gotten uppity.
Musk's swashbuckling decisiveness projects a can-do attitude. The leader leads. Musk isn't managing for "stakeholders" of multiple interests who want consensus in a shared power arrangement. He manages for himself.
The intractable inflation of the 1960s and 1970s came from guns-and-butter spending for the Vietnam War, then an oil price shock, and then an expectation settled into society that wages and prices were moving up on an unstoppable escalator. Cost of Living Adjustments--COLAs--were commonplace in rental agreements, labor arrangements, pensions, everything. Leaders didn't set prices. The system set them.
Ronald Reagan shocked that system in 1981, his first year as president. Air traffic controllers were widely acknowledged to have a stressful job. They were understaffed, they had enormous responsibilities, and they were paid middling salaries. Their union, PATCO, wanted higher wages and better working conditions. The federal government refused. Employees struck. Reagan fired them all.
Elon Musk is a disrupter. He announced mass firing at Twitter. He said if employees wanted to keep working they needed to commit to being hard core and to work 18 hours a day. If not, leave. Good riddance.
Reagan's firing PATCO strikers involved only 11,000 people directly, but it sent a giant signal to employees everywhere. There wasn't an escalator. There was a boss who would fire people or move the jobs to China. The rich got richer. Owners of capital did very well in the past 40 years. Worker wages stagnated.
The era of worker empowerment is in its infancy. Technology leads it, but in health care, building trades, hospitality, even government, work isn't getting done because employers cannot find workers. A recession and a bold visible leader can kill this infant in its cradle. Musk appears to be giving it a try. He is showing companies that they can fire employees and survive--or maybe not. We will find out. Maybe every corporation inconvenienced by an advisory board of workers, or a corporate board worried about an ESG score, can do the same.
The world is at work trying to figure out Musk. He is talking about being "anti-woke" and that gets him support on the political right. I think it is much bigger than that. I think he resends the signal Ronald Reagan sent. He represents and leads a counter-trend away from employee empowerment and back toward the power of capital. He is so comfortable with being boss that he can make a performance out of letting there be a pretend vote about it--among users. Not employees. Employees were starting to think they had power, and that has to stop.
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5 comments:
Musk is just a colossal Jerk who does not care about anyone but himself. He is 51 years old with the mentality of a teen or young, egomaniacal, college student.
Of the Twitter employees he has not yet fired, probably many of them are looking for new jobs or otherwise plotting their escape. Or they will do so in the new year, after the holidays.
The only employees he will have left are geeks with no life, like him. Inappropriate as always, in July 2022 Musk, Mr. Alpha Big Shot, announced to the world that he hadn't had sex "in ages."
Everyone needs to start ignoring this jerk and his failing, overpriced company. Former and future-former Twitter employees, who are highly skilled and talented, will do fine when all of the dust settles. High tech companies are always whining that there is a shortage of high tech workers.
Musk bought Twitter and then tried to renege on the deal. He laid off workers and then tried to hire them back. He allows hate speech but banned a number of mainstream media reporters, then reinstated them. He’s a self-proclaimed champion of free speech but has banned links to other social media.
It's a very interesting business model, but not something I’d care to invest in.
Good insights Peter. It's always about leverage. Reagan took a big risk. If planes had started crashing or flights came to a standstill, there would be another story.
There's something else going on in "Tech" and it's called automation. Automation is now displacing the workers who created the automation. GitHub and Stack-overflow are giant repositories of free code that can be assembled to create powerful programs with surprisingly little skill and effort. For example, two high-school juniors were awarded first prize at an IEEE AI conference I recently attended, for creating a program that sampled the sound of coughs that correctly diagnosed patient illness >95% of the time based on the sounds of the cough, using machine learning. They coded it in less than a week.
I had 14 engineers on my team 6 months ago. I now have 5. In the past 24 months we built 2 automation tools that not only eliminated their well-paid jobs entirely, but the tools produced more accurate and faster outputs than they did. The sense of job security has vanished and people know they are disposable.
Per your post last week about GPT chat and AI, even "Creatives" are not immune from this shift in leverage. Musk is just the tip of the iceberg.
I hope twitter goes bankrupt
Reagan sent a giant signal to certain categories of public employees everywhere, as did Joe Biden recently to publicly subsidized and partially government-controlled railway workers: namely, that the general public interest comes first when it comes to mass infrastructure and services. Musk and Twitter are not comparable--unless of course we all agree that social media giants should be treated as public utilities after all. Impacts the ongoing free speech debate, natch...
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