As Elon Musk cements control of Twitter, he’s already effected a remarkable transformation to the global platform, inspiring racist trolls, Russian disinformation bots, and other socially repugnant specimens everywhere to enlist in his noble crusade for untrammeled “free speech.” He’s even gotten into the act himself, tweeting vicious lies about the Republican-inspired attack on House Speaker Pelosi’s husband, then deleting them like a giggling teenager trying to cover his tracks.
Now he’s ensconcing himself in an even more rarefied pantheon: the realm of the abusive employer. As reported by Lora Kolodny for CNBC, the new normal at Twitter for some employees appears to be an 84-hour work week.
Managers at Twitter have instructed some employees to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, in order to hit Musk’s aggressive deadlines, according to internal communications. The sprint orders have come without any discussion about overtime pay or comp time, or about job security. Task completion by the early November deadline is seen as a make-or-break matter for their careers at Twitter.
Musk appears to be using a “carrot and stick” approach to these abusive practices, as he has publicly declared vast numbers of layoffs are in the offing, thus cultivating an atmosphere of “fear and distrust” at the company, according to Kolodny’s reporting. Employees claim they’ve been left largely in the dark as to whether they’ll be targeted, even as their managerial taskmasters implement weekend assignments, sleeping (presumably) on cots laid out in their offices on Friday and Saturday nights, according to reporting by Grace Dean of Business Insider.
CNBC reported that staff haven't been told whether they'll get overtime pay, time off in lieu, or job security for working on the assignments.
Staff worry that their careers at Twitter could be over if they don't complete their tasks by the early November deadlines, CNBC reported.
Twitter's managers, meanwhile, have been asked to carry out performance reviews and send Musk's team lists of which employees should be kept on, people familiar with the discussions told Insider.
The process has been likened to a ”Hunger Games” mentality, subjecting employees to do-or-die, busy-work scenarios even as Musk repopulates the company’s leadership with staff culled from his other companies. Still, the prevailing survival theory among employees seems to be “propinquity,” or proximity to the office, as a means of—perhaps—staving off the inevitable:
"Propinquity is huge right now," one of the people said, saying employees feel it's better to be close to the action. There's a sense among workers that some of the recent things they've been asked to do, like print out their recent coding work for Musk to look at (only to be told to throw it away) and work the weekend, is a test to show who has been working hard and who is likely to keep doing so.
Admittedly it’s difficult to feel too sorry for these employees, many of whom are being compensated at levels significantly higher than most workers, some with the prospect of vesting stock options from the once-and-future public company being dangled in front of their noses. Since the early 2000s, there has always been a degree of cachet and status attached to working for these “cutting-edge” tech companies, which is certainly a huge factor in their draw.
But an 84-hour week still means you’re working twice as hard as everyone else, so your real compensation is essentially cut in half. And the cost to your health and well-being in such circumstances often leaves more permanent scars in terms of fatigue, disease, depression, failed relationships, and substance abuse. Young people in particular are often lured into these regimens—often cynically characterized as a “rite of passage”—by companies whose profit motives are prioritized above all else.
More to the point, the fact that your CEO happens to be an egomaniacal billionaire doesn’t justify these types of exploitative, coercive labor regimes. Several countries in the EU (Germany, for example), have strict laws prohibiting work exceeding a maximum number of hours, and EU regulations mandate that employers track their employees’ work hours, just to avoid scenarios like the one happening at Twitter right now.
Perhaps Twitter’s beleaguered employees should ask themselves a simple question: what kind of employer judges his employee’s fitness for his company by forcing them to work impossible hours, goading them like hamsters with the reward of future stock options, simply to prove their worth? And is it really in their long-term best interest to work for such a person in such an environment? If the answer is “yes,” then, by all means, Musk is the employer for you.
Still, I’ve been told there are a lot of jobs out there right now.
