Why aren’t we more offended by the term “human resources”? Isn’t this the equivalent of being equaled to bauxite or raw rubber or oil?
Why can’t we be both employees and human beings?
As far as management is concerned, we are quite a bit less than bauxite or raw rubber or oil. If the price of resources go up, industries will take a bite out of their profits to buy them. But if the price of payroll goes, up, they’ll just lay people off.
Underlying the “human resources” issue is why we go into business in the first place. Corporate mission statements are full of high-falutin’ language about “serving the customers” and “producing quality products,” and “optimizing shareholder value.” The latter is most accurate, since it reflects the fact that people go into business pretty much exclusively to make money. If they can accomplish that by not serving the customer – or screwing the customer entirely – or by making complete crap, by God, they shall do so. They sure as hell do not go into business to employ people. If they have to, they will, but only if they absolutely have to. Not inconsequently, this is why Bush’s trickle down economic policy is no guarantee of good jobs for the rest of us.
If you are a “human resource,” your labor is being used to create wealth above and beyond the value of the goods and services you help create. This is how businesses profit. Marx called this “surplus value”: that value added to a good or provided by a service with the application of labor. The question quickly arises, then, of how much of this surplus value you, as a “human resource”
deserve. If the resource model is to be taken seriously, the answer is nothing. You are paid out of tradition or pesky legal issues. If you’re an actual person, of course you deserve something, at least as much as you have, in proportion to the finished product, put into its creation.
If we followed this rubric, managers and CEOs would actually probably earn less than actual “production” workers, since they have much less direct influence on the creation of a product’s surplus value. But if we follow this line of reasoning a bit further, we run smack-dab into why people work. We work to make a living; as individuals, we work to employ ourselves profitably. If we think we are doing that, we’re liable to take pride in our work, to serve customers because we’re proud of what we do instead of having the words codified in a pie-in-the-sky mission statement. What we are less likely to tolerate is somebody else, shareholders or management, making money off of our hard work.
Management will whine at this point that “We are businesses, not charities!” And they are right: charities give money to those whose needs are so dire that they require immediate help. Employment rewards work with a share of the surplus value of the goods or services created. Employed people deserve an equitable one.
Stockholders will argue that they deserve a share because they take a risk by investing their money. They are also correct. But who invests more, the stockholder who invests only money, or the worker who invests her precious time on this planet and the work of her hands and mind? That workers often have money in the business’s retirement plan further ratchets up her stake,
and, I would argue, the recompense she deserves.
Is it not about time, so long after the enfranchisement of the common man in the world of politics, for workers’ true value to the market be realized? Is it not time that we should be seen as actual people and more than the crude oil and pig iron and grain that feed the machine?
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