Your HR Department Hates You: How Corporate Overseers Exploit Workers

[Panich52]

Your HR Department Hates You: How Corporate Overseers Exploit Workers
HR culture is killing innovation and dehumanizing the workplace.
By Cliff Weathers / AlterNet

For most of the 20th century, corporations got along just fine without human resources departments. Instead, they had personnel managers who found new employees and handled the welfare of those on payroll. Personnel managers were pretty low on the corporate totem pole, quietly administering a multitude of banal tasks.

But something began to change in the 1980s. With the arrival of globalization and the Information Age, corporate stability gave way to rapid, unpredictable change. Corporations no longer saw workers as loyal partners and creative beings in a productive enterprise. Instead, they became commoditized assets on a balance sheet to be acquired and discarded to suit changing fortunes.

Meanwhile, corporations began to see the term “personnel” as synonymous with the support of employees and new workplace efficiency techniques such as Six Sigma created a need for corporate compliance overseers. So, those who were once responsible for advocating for employees were now embedded with management, becoming cold wardens of the workplace.  

More:
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/hr-hates-you-how-corporate-overseers-devalue-workers?akid=12815.1924881.E_lzZH&rd=1&src=newsletter1032210&t=5
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[appalachiablue]

1. Huge change for the worse Re workers since the 80s, from Personnel Depts. to anti-human, corp. HR.

Good article.

[nichomachus]

2. The very name betrays the attitude

You are now a resource - a commodity -- like wood or paper. They try to acquire you for the cheapest price and then dispose of you when no longer needed.

Now, it's getting worse. your disposal is guaranteed upfront.

About 30 percent of corporate workers are what are known as "contingent" workers. You get signed on for a project or a task within the project. When the task or project is done, you're out and you have to go find another task or project at another company. Companies are hoping to raise that 30 percent figure to 50 percent in the near future.

In fact, one of the big topics of conversation among computer security experts right now is how to ensure that new hires get all the access and permissions that they need when signing on and how the company can take them all away when they get dumped a few months down the road. This is turning out to be a big problem for them. These orphan employee accounts can provide a back door into the IT systems.

I don't care what they say about your being an associate, a team members, a member of the family. You are a "resource" and a disposable one at that.

[Sherman A1]

3. Precisely

Sums it up rather well.