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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Why must it be this way[?]"

Follow the money.

I don't mean that as snark; I'm serious. I think people in general don't follow the money enough. Even some people who occasionally advocate for it are very selective about it and frequently just treat it as a slur to deploy sometimes. But it's more important than that. It should always be part of the analysis of a business. If you aren't paying for it, you aren't the beneficiary of it.

In the case of HR, if you are a productive, profit-center worker for the company, you may in fact at least be partially paying for it, and may get treated accordingly, though I wouldn't count on that for much. But if you are not clearly in that category....

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Large companies can combat this by aligning its incentives to include worker well-being and retention as part of their equation.

Unhappy workers and revolving-door hiring costs real money. Quantifying these values in terms of dollars can be helpful for creating a work place that encourages personal growth and increases positive feedback for workers in terms of money/bonuses for all levels.

You have to put worker relations in terms of money to get the needle to move, but when you do, you will be shocked how much good you can do for the workers if you can quantify their unhappiness and morale.

Doing the right thing is often just a matter of paying attention to the right metrics. Not every company is short-sited on labor. Companies are in a position to create win-win scenarios for its workers and the bottom line if the incentives are aligned.

It's a matter of legal accountability. If companies get away with defending the harassers, then that's what the cynical ones will do. Only if they get punished when they handle sexual harassment cases badly, will they start handling them better. Companies should be liable for extra damages in sexual harassment cases when it turns out they have a history of protecting the harassers. And maybe punish the individuals involved in protecting the harassers.

Exactly: it's all about money, and also individual consequences to HR staff themselves. If the company stood to lose lots of money to bad behavior, then they would police it much better. But they don't, so they don't. Instead, it would be hazardous to their own careers if they disciplined or canned people that the upper management favored (due to cronyism), so they protect those people as long as it doesn't cost the company too much.

People really need to get past this idea that HR is there to protect employees. They are NOT your friends.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

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