#ethnic minorities
The false equivalence in Musk is so strong, as if people anywhere should be exploited way past safe, mental and physical limitations. There are reasons for limiting work and why there are regulations about age, overtime, and compensation. Technology is already a problem where work easily bleeds into uncompensated time and leave.
This isn’t complimentary to anyone’s work ethic and falls square into the model minority myth. Many of us remember the horror of hearing about people committing suicide over work conditions or overworking themselves to death at Foxconn factories, and the reaction was to install nets and hire a PR firm. Things are outsourced to China and other “developing” countries for exploitative reasons, not because people are unwilling to do them and the safeguards against reckless profiteering in one place do not extend to corporations internationally.
This is a colonialist attitude, as if Chinese and other ethnic minorities have not been historically exploited as migrant labour–underpaid, undervalued, and put in harm’s way even as citizens of industrialized nations. People still feel the need to count how many generations their families have lived and toiled because we’re constantly reminded we are seen as foreign, discriminated against, and always a hair from being blamed for our own victimization.
Elon and his ilk can take their backhanded praise and choke on it.
