Quote:
Originally Posted by tecomsin
My experience and what I have read elsewhere is that this kind of situation is not about what you or anyone else 'deserves'.
HR is there to protect the company, not to protect any individual employee.
Also it helps to clarify in your own mind what is your primary goal right now and act accordingly. If it is to keep your job until you find another one, or if it is to convince your CEO that you are in the right and your boss is in the wrong... or something else. Those are all very different goals and have different demands.
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This statement is true, since the dawn of time and the
first human resources department.
While it was originally called the 'personnel dept.,' human resources has evolved past protecting the worker's rights to protecting companies' and corporations' from lawsuits by their employees.
As
this article's title indicates, "HR is not there to be your friend, it's there to protect the company."
Quote:
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Human resources departments started in the early 1900s when companies were trying to figure out how to reduce turnover and maximize performance through new compensation systems. The HR staff would conduct exit interviews and collect grievances about issues that caused companies to lose employees or led to unionization efforts.
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Quote:
Then in the 1980s, union membership began to drop off and companies no longer wanted to hear about what people wanted. They had other things to worry about — like making sure that they were complying with all of the new worker protection laws that were being passed.
“By that period, HR’s mandate kind of shifted to protecting the company,” said Cappelli. The main task for HR was — how do we stay out of trouble with the government? “In those periods, we started to see HR becoming much more of the compliance cop and trying to make people behave on issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, those sort of things,” he explained.
And while the main mandate was to protect the company, sometimes that also meant protecting employees — like if they were being discriminated against by their line manager or harassed. In this case, HR would want to interfere to protect the employee from their manager in order to prevent a potential lawsuit.
This is also why a lot of the sexual harassment claims in the workplace end up being settled, instead of going to court. Typically, such settlements come with a non-disclosure agreement, which ends up protecting the company’s reputation.
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Read
this woman's blog about her yearlong stint as an Uber driver and how their human resources dept. tried to screw her over.
Yes, you had to defend yourself against your boss, golden_eve. But what tecomsin says IS factual: human resources departments no longer are there to protect the employee, but to protect the company from the employee.
Bottom line: do NOT trust a human resources dept. to help you or protect you while you are in your workplace. Their agenda is to protect the company's financials, not the employee's benefits or safety on the job.