How HR Took Over the World (economist.com) 98
Human-resources departments in American companies employed 1.3 million professionals in 2024, a 64% increase over ten years. Overall employment grew 14% in the same period. Professional-services and technology firms saw the number of HR workers double since 2014. Similar patterns have emerged in Australia, Britain and Germany.
Chief human-resources officers also gained ground financially. Their total compensation, which stood at 40% of the average director's salary in 1992, reached 70% by 2022, according to a Stanford University study. Mary Barra, who runs General Motors, previously held the carmaker's top HR position.
The expansion has followed several workplace disruptions, including the Me Too movement, the pandemic's shift to remote work, and the rise of diversity initiatives, Economist reports. Companies also faced more state regulations on employee relations and a jump in workplace complaints. The average number of discrimination or harassment allegations rose from six per 1000 employees in 2021 to 15 last year.
Chief human-resources officers also gained ground financially. Their total compensation, which stood at 40% of the average director's salary in 1992, reached 70% by 2022, according to a Stanford University study. Mary Barra, who runs General Motors, previously held the carmaker's top HR position.
The expansion has followed several workplace disruptions, including the Me Too movement, the pandemic's shift to remote work, and the rise of diversity initiatives, Economist reports. Companies also faced more state regulations on employee relations and a jump in workplace complaints. The average number of discrimination or harassment allegations rose from six per 1000 employees in 2021 to 15 last year.
Fixed that for ya (Score:4, Interesting)
"How Companies Finally Realized They Need to Invest in Reasonable HR Staffing Levels"
Re:Fixed that for ya (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seems about on par with my experience with HR.
Having to deal with those people can turn a body misogynistic right quick.
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HR often has an Orwellian aspect to their communication. They say things in a way that sounds like they are there to help you, but they are really there to gatekeep. Not everyone can have the salary, promotion, office, etc that they want, and HR is there to control those things, and minimize the company's legal problems in doing so. The double-speak and gatekeeping make them incredibly frustrating to deal with.
On top of that they also know a lot of private info, from salary to disciplinary actions to disp
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On top of that they also know a lot of private info, from salary to disciplinary actions to disputes they got involved in, so they're often in a position of quite a lot of leverage.
That sounds like an unsafe workplace. You should bring that up — oh wait.
Re:Fixed that for ya (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pointless link to a paywalled article.
Re:Fixed that for ya (Score:4, Interesting)
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Or:
"Every HRIS software solution is a rats nest of shit and garbage, cemented together with used chewing gum and toxic industrial sealant that gives you headaches just for looking at it, running on top of archaic and deeply outdated vendor lock-in 'enterprise solutions.' Thus you need more humans to get done what needs doing. See: Oracle HMS, Workday, ADP, BambooHR, etc."
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"How Companies Finally Realized They Need to Invest in Reasonable HR Staffing Levels"
Oh my poor innocent sweet summer consumer...
You actually think HR has anything to do with helping workers. No, misguided one
No, no, no.
HR exists to protect the company _from_ it's employees. If US companies are expanding their HR, then they're preparing for war with their own employees.
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Liability (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's cheaper to hire a team of a dozen HR professionals than be exposed to a single lawsuit from an employee.
Re:Liability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Liability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Liability (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nothing like giving people the runaround until they're exhausted...
Re:Liability (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC in legal theory for liability, they call this the "empty chair" tactic. Where each defendant points to an "empty chair" aka, a party not involved in the dispute and lays culpability to this non-party. If everyone confront then points to the "empty chair" they can shirk responsibility.
Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.
Re:Liability (Score:5, Interesting)
You're confusing two different things.
"DEI twats" should *never* be publicly named with any actual job title (except perhaps "DEI twat")
They don't do HR. They can't do HR because they don't know how or even what it is.
HR is meant to be a subset of legal. They specialize in employment law, not unlike a labor law lawyer would specialize, but without the typical powers of being a lawyer.
Just like decision makers should run any contract by the legal department for their legal advice, decision makers should run any employee related decisions by HR for legal advice.
Their job is to say to upper management "Don't do that you dolt, that's illegal" or "Yup that's fine"
The COST being discussed is the cost of being pulled into court because some upper management dolt did something illegal without knowing or caring and losing the lawsuit.
HR is supposed to tell that manager not to do the illegal thing so that the company doesn't get successfully sued.
It has nothing to do with the cost of HR itself.
No HR to tell people not to do illegal crap is akin to no legal department to tell you that contract would be stupid to sign, or that new product is illegal to sell, etc
Re: Liability (Score:2)
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This excuse doesn't survive even most marginal scrutiny, such as observing that growth of HR has been massive in countries where employee lawsuits cannot legally generate large enough fines/restitution payments to justify the cost of HR.
Remember, HR is not your friend. (Score:2)
Even though they might appear to be.
In Soviet Russia, HR protects the company from YOU.
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To protect the company (usually upper management) which could mean firing troublesome employees or troublesome management - depends which is cheaper
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Erm, going with the meme's intent, shouldn't it be In Soviet Russia, HR protects you from company?
Because what you said is exactly what HR is for in all of the western world.
Labor is your most important resource (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone that is willing to show up and be paid less than what they produce is a gold mine. Party of the grift requires businesses to treat everyone like shit, make everyone feel that their work is meaningless, that they are easily replaced, and that they won't survive without a job. HR departments have grown to fill that need of corporate propaganda and overall management of the greatest grift in history.
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Why would someone pay you based on what they "produce"? That's just dumb. We get paid according to the market value of our work, the highest that someone is willing to pay us because if we didn't take the job they could get someone else for $1 more. If we get paid based on the money our work generates, that would be stupid .. no society would function like taht. It means, if I take a cab to my job, the cab driver should get paid a percentage of my salary .. because their ride enabled me to make $100k or wha
Re:Labor is your most important resource (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people speculate that it might be better to pay people based on the value they create in the world instead of whatever the market decides. A lot of people would argue that the market is actually a good way to decide how much value someone creates, so it all works out.
Other people say that a lawyer who files frivolous lawsuits to make money or a quack naturopathic doctor who proscribes pumpkin seeds to cure cancer actually create negative value, yet they get paid quite a lot sometimes, so therefor the market is an ineffeciant way of deciding how much to pay people. Also some people do quite a bit of important work but get paid very little, such as people who work in a factory making motherboards, or people who clean public bathrooms.
Then there's the matter of people who make a ton of money by owning things but do no work at all, such as heirs to large fortunes. Some ask "If the market is good at deciding how to pay people based on the value they can produce why are these non-producers making a very large chunk of all the money out there?"
Most americans at this point will piss themselves and run away from dangerous thoughts like these.
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Some ask "If the market is good at deciding how to pay people based on the value they can produce why are these non-producers making a very large chunk of all the money out there?"
However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".
Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose ou
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"Some people speculate that it might be better to pay people based on the value they create in the world instead of whatever the market decides."
Easier said than done. I was one of 200 people in a chemical plant. How do we apportion "value they create" in that circumstance? Does the forklift operator get the same as the control room operator? How about the R&D team? Or the HR droidette? Does pay depend on layers of PPE required to do the job? (HR, none. Unit operator, Full set. Maintenance worker? Full
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it might be better to pay people based on the value they create in the world instead of whatever the market decides
- market is a collection of all people involved, who is better suited to decide on what the value is other than all of the people as a collective vote?
doctor who proscribes pumpkin seeds to cure cancer actually create negative value, yet they get paid quite a lot sometimes, so therefor the market is an ineffeciant way of deciding how much to pay people.
- they are removing the money from the gullible, which may be argued is a better way to redistribute the money (all done willingly even though misguidedly).
people who make a ton of money by owning things but do no work at all, such as heirs to large fortunes
- the market has already decided that the parents of heirs were productive enough, that even their heirs can now enjoy the fruits of the labor of the people who made the money.
Most americans at this point will piss themselves and run away from dangerous thoughts like these.
- dangerous by what measu
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How do you decide what the value of someone's work is?
The problem came up before the Russian revolution. The socialist revolutionaries thought yours was a great idea, but the best they could come up with for actually assigning value was "um, a committee of some kind maybe?"
The market answer is that competitive buyers will pay you what your work is worth. That obviously requires competitive buyers, and the absence of obstacles like, for example, health insurance benefits interfering with your ability to swit
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Market is the most accurate mechanism for measuring created value that we have. We have tried many other mechanisms, and none of them come even close in accuracy.
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Most americans at this point will piss themselves and run away from dangerous thoughts like these.
This surprises you? The only way to 'force' values like that is to give government more power than it should ever have. We have seen throughout history what governments do when they can do anything, and it is not pretty.
I do not have a recommended solution, but I am glad that you brought the subject up.
You may be paying a percentage of your salary (Score:2)
Why would someone pay you based on what they "produce"?
I never suggested a proportional pay system. But the upper limit is paying someone based on what they produce, anything less than that makes it possible to operate a business, paying anything more and it's not likely the role can be justified.
We get paid according to the market value of our work, the highest that someone is willing to pay us because if we didn't take the job they could get someone else for $1 more.
The labor market is not a free market. There is significant manipulation on three sides of it; from unions, from business, and from government regulation. For the most part, whatever mechanism you imagine creates a "market value" for your labor is just that, mostly jus
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Coddling (Score:4, Funny)
Gen Z and Millenial whiners need constant coddling, thatâ(TM)s why. Bunch of snowflakes. Back in my day your boss would throw a chair at you and you just took it.
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Ah, ah ah! Careful there or one of us snowflakes might need to charge a phone and unplug your respirator!
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Found Steve Ballmer's bitch!
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And going running to HR for petty shit makes you tough? Which planet is that? LOL. There are certain things a man should tolerate or let go out of toughness, and certain things .. actually very few things .. he shouldn't. And when those things he shouldn't tolerate happen, it still doesn't mean running to HR like a lil bitch. At that point it's some man to man shit. That's when it pops off.
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What does HR actually do? (Score:3, Informative)
I work for a great company, have for 8 years now, I was employee three, I joined when we didn't have HR. To be honest, the HR lady is great, she's friendly, answers questions, helps find solutions, and the opposite of every other HR person I've had to deal with in a professional capacity. When the company started looking for medical benefits, I made a simple request: “Please get medical cannabis coverage!”, and they did, they took that request seriously, honestly, with respect, and helped cover a fairly substantial monthly medical cost. We have very few overall issues at this point, and it's great, so let's move to other examples.
When the company started 9 years ago, we were part of a larger company (whom I won't name), they partnered with us, and gave us two free office rooms, which we used for the first 5 years of the company. The larger company had HR people that we had to interact with, and holy crap, it was terrible. To summarize the list of issues (with some exaggeration):
1. I wouldn't sign a pledge that I was an abusive monster for being biologically male.
2. They tried to stop me from using prescription medication (seriously).
3. They tried to stop me having my medication delivered to the building.
4. They wouldn't approve my disability parking permit, to spite having paper work from my doctors.
5. I got in trouble for standing in the wrong place during a fire drill (I wasn't).
6. When I requested, people kept their voices down outside the offices, write up.
7. Using the gym, they wrote me up
8. Drinking too much coffee, out of my mug, that I brought from home.
9. Wearing an offensive shirt that someone else took offence to, never found out why.
10. Requesting paper work from the HR department be in a certain format.
11. Requesting the larger company reimburse when they threw out medication (seriously).
12. Smelling, like I just used medication (honestly).
13. Looking like I had just used medication...
14. Intimidation, yep, just intimidation, which caused 15.
15. Questioning, yep, asking to see the defined set of standards and rules, and what I did.
16. Coming in on a weekend, to use the bathroom...
17. Refusing to use some platforms and software, that had abusive privacy / licensing polices.
Any way, I could go on, but that's what HR has typically been like for me. It's roadblocks to a construction site that doesn't exist.
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4. They wouldn't approve my disability parking permit, to spite having paper work from my doctors.
They can't just give you a disabled parking permits based on doctor notes. You have to be legally a disabled person.
16. Coming in on a weekend, to use the bathroom...
Why would you wanna do that? There're countless ways to go to the bathroom, why you have to come to work?
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The office was 1/2 way between my house, and my parent's house, and I was driving to my parents, and had to go, so I stopped in quickly to use the washroom, twice.
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Everything for the parking permit was above board, they just denied it, baselessly. I had all the paperwork, and the regulations cleared, they just didn't want to give me it.
You can just park into any of the clearly marked spots for disabled persons. You don't have to have your own spot.
The office was 1/2 way between my house, and my parent's house, and I was driving to my parents, and had to go, so I stopped in quickly to use the washroom, twice.
That leaves the last question: How much longer does it take you to get to the destination without having to stop at work to go to the bath room? Unless you have a bladder condition then I'll understand, but you can usually hold for up to an hour. It's a bit uncomfortable but not terribly bad.
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Not sure how it works in Canada, but here in Florida to get a handicap permit you take a doctors note to the DMV .... Granted once you have that if HR tries to stop you from parking in a legal handicap space, that is a different issue (and not legal in US, probably not Canada)
Re:What does HR actually do? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I wouldn't sign a pledge that I was an abusive monster for being biologically male. Yeah, sure, that's what it said. ... (I never found out, and I didn't drop weights). Write-ups tend to leave a paper trail. The clue is in the name.
2. They tried to stop me from using prescription medication (seriously). Seriously?
3. They tried to stop me having my medication delivered to the building. Don't dissemble. You mean cannabis. Your employer didn't want cannabis on the premises. Deal with it.
4. They wouldn't approve my disability parking permit, to spite having paper work from my doctors. Your doctor doesn't get to decide who gets a disabled space on their property; they can allocate the spaces however they want so long as it's done fairly. I don't believe it was done to spite you.
5. I got in trouble for standing in the wrong place during a fire drill (I wasn't). Were you taking an opportunity to "using your prescription medication" at the time by any chance?
6. When I requested, people kept their voices down outside the offices, write up.
7. Using the gym, they wrote me up
8. Drinking too much coffee, out of my mug, that I brought from home. Was their problem that you were drinking coffee or that you were constantly ducking out to make coffee?
9. Wearing an offensive shirt that someone else took offence to, never found out why. Let's be generous and assume your workplace doesn't have a dress code. Or did you assume the partner company didn't have one either?
10. Requesting paper work from the HR department be in a certain format. Oh, get over yourself.
11. Requesting the larger company reimburse when they threw out medication (seriously). They don't want weed in the office. Take a fucking hint, man.
12. Smelling, like I just used medication (honestly). Clearly we're not talking about some kind of skin ointment here. You're not being honest.
13. Looking like I had just used medication... So they thought you were high. Next?
14. Intimidation, yep, just intimidation, which caused 15. Chewing you out for repeatedly bringing fucking weed into the office is not intimidation.
15. Questioning, yep, asking to see the defined set of standards and rules, and what I did. That would not be grounds for disciplinary action in any job, but something tells me they'd already decided to fire you at that point.
16. Coming in on a weekend, to use the bathroom... Seriously?! It's a place of business, not a fucking truck stop. (Assuming you don't work at an actual truck stop.)
17. Refusing to use some platforms and software, that had abusive privacy / licensing polices. Seriously. Get. The fuck. Over. Yourself. It's a job: you do what you're told with the tools you're given or you leave.
FFS, I'd have sacked you before your list hit double digits, and that's with you trying to describe your situation as favorably as possible.
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Any way, I could go on,
I'm sure you could. You seem quite high maintenance. Over 20 years at a few companies, HR has been mostly inconsequential for me except for occasional transactional questions.
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They took a major issue with cannabis use on the property, which I kept having to show them was a non-starter. In Canada, if you have a legal prescription, you also get federal protection, as you would with any other medication, on where you can use it. Initially, I would walk to the far end of the parking lot, but eventually, I couldn't, so I went to the smoking area, and finally a few meters from the door. They took issue that I smelled after smoking joints,
Medical Plans (Score:1)
So you need to know some history (Score:3)
Over the years unions got busted and broken starting with Ronald reagan. Widespread factory automation meant that you no longer had tens of thousands of individual workers at a single site who could readily organize. Also the corporations moved in and replaced small local churches that could be used for local organization with big mega charges that they controlled with their mega church buddies like Jerry Falwell.
Without the unions they didn't need management the same way to bust unions and keep workers in liworkershey started using management as regular line workers. If you're paying attention your boss has been taking on more regular work year after year and less management work.
But the company still needs somebody to make sure that the company's interests are put before yours. That's HR.
HR is the next evolution and making your life worse and making billionaires lives... Well I'm not going to say better because they're already as good as they can possibly get but just plain letting them have more money in power at your expense.
Of course all of this triggers the fuck out of a ton of libertarian types because they don't like the think about all the systems in the world. Folks want to believe that they can be tremendously successful just with their own two hands and maybe a little bit of brain work and that they don't need anybody else. It's something you pick up when you're a teenager and most people never grow out of it.
Pointing that out also triggers people.
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Tovarisch, I haven't a clue what word you were trying to use there but your STT seems to be busted. You neglected to mention that the unions like all collections of people became subject to corruption and scope creep and lost their way and utility such that people were not sad when they were busted. Sort of like how one goes from symbiosis to a parasite, and then the host rejects you. Btw if the workforce is getting smaller, but HR keeps getting bigger, perhaps there is more t
Google text to speech is a mess (Score:2)
Correcting it for you (Score:2)
> Over the years unions got busted and broken starting with Ronald reagan.
Started with going off the gold standard and Nixon opening diplomatic relations with China.
Add in a Milton Freidman "corporations exist to enrich shareholders", "stacked ranking" in the late 1970s and buy another company to raid the pension fund and you have the start of the downslope of unions.
Add in the "everyone goes to college" federal law in ~1980....
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What's happened with industrial unions is pretty straightforward. And yes, it does have a lot to do with China. Unions were very successful in the US at bringing up wages. So succe
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Your observations do not line up with mine. I have seen people, like my son-in-law who never graduated high school, build successful businesses "with their own two hands and maybe a little bit of brain work".
My friend, this dark lens through which you vie
Replacement Managers (Score:4, Insightful)
HR departments have expanded because they are able to do the mundane tasks that managers are supposed to be doing (hiring, firing, evaluations, settling employee disputes, etc), leaving the managers more time for higher level tasks like three martini lunches and golf junkets.
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So that's what HR departments do?
I'm a manager, and I have to do all those things, and we do have an HR department. In fact, HR makes me jump through MORE hoops to do those things (hiring, firing, evaluations, settling disputes) than I would have had to do without an HR department. I must have missed the memo!
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As best I've been able to tell, HR is the corporate version of a school guidance counselor, but we also put them in charge of legal and accounting issues f
You had to put your losers somewhere... (Score:3)
One of my relatives was around at the dawn of HR at a major multi-national corporation. She was head of their Salary Payroll division. She always told us that the company put their hard-to-fire f^ckups in HR, because it was an area that had little impact on the actual operation of stuff that mattered. Department heads could always hire who they wanted, and tell HR to approve it or else. Over the years, of course, that has changed...with predictable results.
Because a lot of people cry fouls nowadays (Score:2)
At the workplace: - Walking by and happen to look at somebody can be considered staring
- One word of unintentional meaning can "cause emotional distress"
- Sometimes harmless words can still cause emotional distress, all it requires is that someone reports
- Hosting a meeting too long is considered excuses to "taking advantage" of people
In general: - People question why cars change lane even though their accident is
Feminization is the issue (Score:2, Informative)
Most HR personnel are women, and some might assert this is the problem, they are the vanguard of the overwhelming feminization of workplaces.
https://www.compactmag.com/art... [compactmag.com]
"...Everything you think of as âoewokenessâ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is s
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I dated a girl in college who started out as an Aerospace Engineering major.
I don't remember when she ended up graduating with, but it was something like English.
She ended up going into HR when she graduated.
From Aerospace Engineering to HR. Talk about a hard fall.
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So you missed the part that the book/paper/presentation was authored by a woman, then?
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It's HER point you moron.
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I didn't say I disagree with it, but it illustrates the stupidity of your trying to make this about chauvinism.
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Now, I have an anecdota
I have a rule... (Score:4, Insightful)
...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.
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That's interesting. I've had very good overall experiences working for a large company, though HR is still HR of course. With that said, numerous friends and family that work for small companies that don't have HR run into a lot of illegal shit that wouldn't fly at a bigger company like mine. The stories that make me really appreciate my corporate structure over these small accounting firms, small property management firms, small lawyer firms, etc. Seems like a lot of tiny "family" run companies come with a
HR Business Partner (Score:1)
the article misses the observation that the power level of HR in big business probably has widely recedeed compared to e.g. the 1990s. While HR used to be a pilar of its own, many of the HR responsibilities including the core say in hiring/firing/promotion decisions probably passed to line management. It would be interesting where this trend came from. The point of the article that HR is bigger than ever may only be true for quantity.
timme to ask of both Hr and CEOS (Score:2)
Woke HR entryism is now a thing :o (Score:2)
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I see, as opposed to politically-motivated DUI hiring - must be white, male, and allegedly Christian (no Catholics need apply). Competence and experience not necessary.
more efficient (Score:2)
HR increased by 64%. The number of regulations increased by 12,342%. Hence, HR is more efficient than ever before!