Human Resources Isn’t About Humans
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Sure, they also do the paperwork for health care enrollment and track your vacations and such, but that's a fairly minor role. At least that has been my experience. Maybe I'm cynical, though?
And don't wait until it's too late to learn this!
I had a minor form of cancer a few years back, and I went to HR to let them know about it, thinking what I told them would be kept in confidence. I had been with the company for 11 months, and they didn't offer medical leave until 12 months, so I figured with my positive reviews to-date it'd be easy to just get that bumped up a bit.
The next day my manager knew, so everyone knew, and the HR folks that had been seemed so kind and understanding were cold and aloof. Instead of granting my request, they sent me a nice form letter reminding me to read the employee handbook around who would qualify for medical leave and suggested I postpone my treatment until I had been with the company for 12 months.
Of course, this had a lot more to do with me being a key player in helping them land a big project. I'd been the pitchman that the prospective clients liked, and had the most rapport with. To help ensure the company landed a stupid project they were willing to tell me to hold off cancer treatment. Ethical? I mean... it was legal, so they did it. (I resigned and got treatment immediately, also told the prospective client why I resigned. The company didn't get the bid.)
And, if you are ever laid off or fired, HR are the ones who will come down on you about talking to your old friends at the company and do everything they can to save the company every last penny (by screwing you out of it).
Another situation... I had a personal friend at a company, knew him before I got the job. Then I then got laid off with about half the team when the company didn't make numbers one-quarter. The severance package was very specific about us not talking to current employees or clients, but I figured since I knew the guy and he was a friend it wasn't going to be a big deal.
Someone in HR instructed IT to set up a filter to catch all the emails coming in, and when my buddy asked me a question and I responded (it was something silly like the combo to the paid gym in the building -- he wanted to use my membership since I wasn't going to need it), they ran it up the flagpole and immediately cut my health benefits (without warning) and demanded I repay my severance payment. It took a lawyer to get them to back down about repayments, and I never did get my health benefits back.
HR is not to be trusted. Get everything they say in writing. Don't tell them anything you aren't comfortable sending out in an all-hands email.
+1
If an employee complains to HR of harassment, it seems like the most coldly rational, protect-the-company reaction they could have would be to do everything in their power to prevent the complaint from going public and creating a PR nightmare. Taking the complaint seriously is in their power, usually make the complainant go away peacefully, and makes you the "good guy" in the court of public opinion if it comes to that.
Furthermore, given a situation where one of your staff is abusing their position in any way, I would think most companies would rather find that out from their HR department than from the local newspaper or the district attorney.
So why isn't that the default strategy for HR departments? I understand that not every HR director is necessarily competent, and that large enough power discrepancies can overcome a lot of good intentions, but it seems like best-practice HR procedure is to essentially sweep problems under the rug and hope they go away instead of making an effort to honestly address them. That can't possibly be a good long-term strategy, can it?
The other thing is that people bring their bias with them and an organization's culture can make it worse. If someone is a bit biased against victims of harassment, in HR they'll tend to side with the harasser. If the culture of the company already tends towards hostile/indifferent/unsupportive, it only makes HR's behavior worse.
Maybe HR is still the best ROI, but I think the equation could go either way.
While the concept of an HR-ombudsman is intriguing, this doesn't strike me as the kind of decision the ombudsman should be particularly tasked with. For one, I've always associated the ombudsman role as one that investigates complaints without being beholden to the corporate authority, i.e. the thing that constrains HR to act in behalf of the company's interests.
The worry that an employee deserves special treatment because of that employee's connections/privilege does not strike me as a "complaint". Street-smarts, perhaps, but it's already the prerogative of management and PR to break the rules for public-facing real-world concerns. An ombudsperson being influential in bending the rules in favor of someone who is deemed important/better-than-the-average employee strikes me as the very opposite of the decision that the ombudsperson should be concerned with.
True. Coincidentally, HR has some of the lowest-paid professional roles on the org chart. You get what you pay for.
Simple talent market demand/supply issue. There are tons of people with liberal arts degrees. Engineering, not so much.
I'd make an exception for blatantly illegal behavior, in which case I'd report the issue anonymously.
HR is not there for employees.
Nonetheless I think it is time for HN to admit, and celebrate, that it has become an international forum and start behaving accordingly.
No results.
How many lawyers does your employer have? How many do you have? Equalise things. Join a union!
Don't have the clout to change something yourself? Join a union!
Worried that the boss will retaliate and you won't be able to do anything? Join a union!
Want a friendly, non-judgemental ear to give you advice? Join a union!
Want to gather lots of information about working conditions in a safe a anonymous way? Join a union!
Worried that you're being discriminated against? Join a union!
Need to bargain for better rights or pay? JOIN A UNION!
Want to improve the way the "lazy fat cat union bosses" work? Guess what - unions are democratic! Join a union and improve it!
I'm in a senior(ish) position in the tech industry and I'm a proud member of https://www.prospect.org.uk/
When I've had problems, my union has given me top-notch advice. They've provided expensive legal support. They've trained me up. They've helped me out. I pay ~£18/month to be a member. I consider it a form of legal insurance - and it is bloody cheap. Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant has paid for the union dues for many years to come.
tl;dr Unions work.
In practice, American unions failed to see that. Even if we ignore the cases where leadership just enriched themselves, unions concerned themselves mostly with extracting as much value as the employer would bear, and to a lesser degree to shield employees from the consequences of their mistakes.
On the other hand, fluid capitals means jobs would have gotten outsourced regardless of union's stance. In Mexico, which is far from having the cheapest labor in the world, minimum wage is less than $5USD per day. There are loads of social problems derived from that, but the fact that this is feasible at all relies on a much lower cost of living compared with USA. Try to implement that on the other side of the border and you'd be facing bread riots in no time.
And, so what if the employees are trying to extract as much value as they can out of their employer? Isn't that what capitalism is all about? Isn't that what the employer is doing to the employees, and anyone else they deal with? Why do we see it as acceptable for the company to do so, but not the workers?
So toss out the idea of giving workers more leverage entirely, or try to adapt with the times? The relocation example shows that the business isn't on your side.
How many jobs has not having a union prevented from being outsourced? Even when not fully outsourced, how many of us work at companies that have foreign offices in certain regions that pay a fraction of the US going rate? Or that invest much heavier in lobbying for increased immigration than in worker training/re-training programs?
After the local public-sector union made brief noises about unionizing postdocs - my then-supervisor, himself protected from accountability by the double shield of tenure and union, tried to discourage us from supporting the effort - and retreated quickly I changed my position. The local union boss graduated one (1) PhD student during his 30 years on the faculty. Other faculty members were on the record of saying they are ashamed to be represented by such a lazybag.
American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner.
Work unlike normal products has a fuzzy relationship to market forces because people are not quite fungible. If you pay relative to the lowest common denominator, then the surplus from over performers ends up with the company. Ratchet up the pay and that surplus ends up with under performers.
They became too focused on an adversarial relationship with the company. Germany has the right of things. Unions there have guaranteed board seats [0]. This gives the employees more of a say in the direction of the company.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
Beginning in the 1980s the whole relationship changed. Companies started hiring professional tiger teams to roll in and negotiate with the most aggressive tactics possible. They began to regard the union to an impediment to profits and make every effort to undermine and break it. Corporations began to even engage in tactics like strategic bankruptcies to invalidate their union contracts and cancel their pensions.
American Labor has always wanted a relationship like the one in Germany. It's aways been the other side who's resisted that. Current "Maximum Shareholder Value" theory insists that labor should have no say in how the company is run, because the only stakeholder that matters is the investor.
I'm not sure how it is in Europe, but in the public higher education space here in the U.S. the unions are way to powerful.
An example of this imbalance:
All faculty and staff members for the California State University system are part of the same union. That means that the union has the collective bargaining power of all 50,000 employees. The union is very good at their job of protecting employees, and will always resist any disciplinary action by the administration, even if the employee is clearly in the wrong. This leads to a situation where administration will simply ignore extremely low-performing individuals because they would have to fight the union to do so.
Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane.
When unions are this big and this focused, their collective bargaining power, IMO, exceeds what is necessary to protect workers.
With the union you mentioned your a part of things seem to be better structured. Though it is large at around 140,000 members, they seem to be spread across many companies and I imagine that not every company is made up of 100% union employees. Also the fact that your union encompasses a wide variety of professions is definitely a big positive. That seems more like a fairer balance of power to me.
This is to avoid the free rider problem. Removing this requirement basically kills a union. Right-to-work laws, for example, are 100% about neutering unions, and they do so by precisely this mechanism. Voluntary associations have serious problems that severely limit their effectiveness. Same reason e.g. taxes can't be voluntary.
California is decidedly against right-to-work laws, so why in this case you are allowed to opt out of the benefits of the union while still having to pay for it is what I take issue with.
If you are allowed to choose not to join the union then you shouldn't have to pay union dues.
Don't think of it as club membership, think of it as a negotiator's fee that's baked into your employment contract.
Further, the union may negotiate things like compensation and benefits packages for all workers because not doing so would terminally weaken them by letting management entice workers to leave the union, until it eventually dies—and then management can enjoy the deeply unequal bargaining position of giant-organization versus uncoordinated individuals, until workers organize again—but this time management can kill it more easily and inexpensively before it even gets started, through he same process, but with the bonus that this time they can also be much more coercive and punitive in their approach toward certain especially troublesome individuals since they have less-effective oversight.
[EDIT] bah, I effed up my reasoning on that second part by starting with one thing then going another direction and not fixing the first bit. There are two separate problems: 1) if non-union folks don't have to pay dues, the employer can kill the union by enticing people away from it, and 2) if they can hire non-union at below-union compensation (say, if you have to pick up-front whether you're union and can't sign on later) then they can simply only hire people who don't join the union (and preferentially retain non-union folks) until it dies.
You misunderstand the situation. California public employees covered by a union can opt out of union membership and full membership dues and pay reduced “fair share” fees, get all the benefits negotiated by the union (including union representation in disciplinary proceedings); they only benefits they lose are voting rights and non-representational benefits (e.g., if the union has separate arrangements to make products or services available to members separate from benefits negotiated with the employer.)
[EDIT] more generally there's a bunch of game-theoretic stuff that keeps unions from being effective if all participation in them is totally voluntary. Union-busting laws usually aim to disrupt the preconditions necessary for the survival of unions, often by simply forcing them all to be voluntary, probably choosing that tactic because there's a personal liberty argument to be made in its favor. Why these people are so insistent that one particular requirement for working for a given employer (join the relevant union) should be outlawed while all manner of other requirements the employer themselves may have are just fine is left as an exercise for the reader.
No, they're not. The idea that you should have to join an outside organization to work for a government agency is ridiculous. Doubly so when those same groups spend extremely heavily on politics.
My point is that you should be able to work for a government agency without joining a union. That is a reason for right-to-work laws that has nothing to do with neutering unions. If unions can't survive without people being legally obligated to join them that is on them and they should adapt to meet that reality.
You dodged the point above, but the governmental agencies themselves are politically active. So are very nearly all employers.
[EDIT] my point being, why is aiding one politically-active organization (your employer) as a requirement for employment entirely fine, but being required to aid two is some abridgment of liberty? It's not like it's sprung on you after the fact. It's exactly as much a choice as aiding your employer's political agenda (i.e. you can not work there).
To head off "if you don't like the political spending of your employer then you can just quit"—right, and you can quit working at a place with a union membership requirement if you don't like the union's political spending. "But that's impractical because almost all the unions spend in ways I don't like". Oh, I know. Guess how lots of people feel about the political spending of almost all employers/companies? Good for the goose, good for the gander.
No, they aren't. As you, yourself, note later (see final quote below).
They all just get the benefit of representation by the same union, even though they can opt-out of actual membership.
> This leads to a situation where administration will simply ignore extremely low-performing individuals because they would have to fight the union to do so.
No, what leads to that is lack of accountability of the administration for aggregate performance. If leadership was accountable, they'd be motivated to act where necessary even if the union would be opposed. (Given the lack of accountability for performance, without union resistance, disciplinary power would be used arbitrarily, and not effectively target low performers either.)
> Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane.
No, they don't. Non-members (membership is opt-out for classifications covered by the union) have to pay what are called "fair share" fees which are related to the functions that the union must provide them as non-member represented employees; only union members pay actual union dues.
I'm curious why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. Did your employer violate relevant laws in your country regarding termination of employment or perhaps violate a contractual obligation on their part that you negotiated when you were hired?
I find that idea, that we hear so frequently, that employees should not extract all the possible value of their employers very uncapitalistic.
"why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. "
I read in those words an implied moral position that I wanted to criticize. My excuses if read it wrong.
>Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant has paid for the union dues for many years to come.
It sounds like he was happy he was able to milk some company out of money just because he got fired. That pinged my frivolous lawsuit radar pretty hard. I would've worded that, "When my employer failed to comply with federal regulations about how to lay me off, my union provided me with a lawyer to help recoup what I was owed." or something to that effect...
If I didn't have a union provided legal firm working on my behalf, I wouldn't have understood my rights.
Fixed.
There's a lot of bad unions out there as well. My wife dealt with one as a cashier at a grocery store in high school. They did less than nothing for her and her coworkers. Never visited the store, never responded to significant issues including discrimination and harassment, never met with management. But they did make sure they got their cut of her pay which, as a poor girl who had to buy her own clothes and pay for everything from the money she earned, she desperately needed.
And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US.
I resent "it's democratic, so vote instead of complaining" in 100% of its incarnations. Democratic systems are a bit more responsive than most others, but they're not actually subject to the desires of any one voter. It's entirely reasonable to look at a system and say "the fixes I think this needs are completely unattainable" or even "I think the voting process of this system is incapable of producing change". Calling unions - or anything - fixable simply because they count up votes feels like a way to silence uncomfortable criticism.
This is kind of obvious from the name.