HR is employed by the company to protect the company/capital.
A regulatory watchdog (so not on company's payroll) would be the one to protect the workers. Even a union could to a certain degree.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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This can't get said enough. HR is not there to help you. HR is there to keep you from being able to sue the company if something happens.
If you have, or someone gives you a cause to sue the company, before hiring a lawyer and possibly (likely) losing your job because you're suing your employer, you can instead take the complaint up with HR. They should recognize the liability for the company in your situation and take steps to minimize or eliminate any possibly perception of blame that could be cast upon the company.
Here, I'll give you an example of something that actually happened to me. I used to work at a grocery store and to say the "left hand doesn't know what the right is doing" .... Would be an understatement. It was a fairly large place in a national chain of stores. I was working in the produce department at the time.... So, the supplier for grapes informed us that the location where the grapes are grown has black widow spiders in the habitat. Though every effort is made to prevent it, there is still the possibility that the grapes may contain traces of venomous spiders.
Corporate HR appeared, like a fart you didn't hear, but you can definitely smell. They tasked my manager to get everyone in the department to sign a paper that said, and I shit you not: we've been made aware of the possibility of black widow spiders in the grapes, and that we understand that we should use specialty gloves that are bite resistant/bite proof when handling the grapes.... As soon as I read that I turned to my manager and said what fucking gloves? Where are these gloves?
We, of course, didn't have any such thing. I asked the manager if they could get some for us and they didn't even know how to do that.
Simply: after everyone has signed the statement, and if anyone is bitten by a black widow, the HR dickwads that work at the company can hold up the form you signed saying "we tooky them to use the gloves for safety, and they were not using those gloves at the time of the incident" .... Because nobody ever got the gloves. Regardless, it lets the company throw you under the bus for getting injured, while management won't help you in staying safe on the job, often encouraging the behaviour that HR says you should not be doing.
HR is not your friend, they're actively protecting the enemy (the business owners) from you, the worker.
Why did anyone even touch the grapes after signing the paper? Seems like a good excuse to say "I can't do that. No gloves. I signed a thing, remember?"
That's essentially what I did. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who took issue with it.
I looked my manager square in the face and told them I would not, under any circumstances, be stocking grapes unless the proper safety equipment was available.
That's a job I never had to do again. Because they never got the safety equipment.
Right to refuse unsafe working conditions is a right where I live. If they tried to retaliate against me it would become a very short lawsuit.
Yeah but then you get bullied about being reasonable
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This is just a tawdry /r/antiwork meme borne of McDonalds burger flipper level reasoning.
Sure, companies maximise profits and hire HR to assist them in that objective.
However, your own interests are often aligned with theirs.
If you want to sue your employer, then obviously HR is not there to help you do that.
However, if your supervisor is an ass who makes witty comments about how many cup cakes you ate, your interests are aligned with HR's - he needs to stop creating fodder for your bullying claim.
I don't presume you've checked the accumulated downvotes but
Mcdonalds burger flipper level reasoning
stinks pretty badly of classist ideology. Paired with a comment that seems more in-tune with the needs of the company than the employee, it does not paint you in a good light.
I understand the comment is speaking from the capitalist's side but you don't have to wear the suit so naturally. Historians won't be putting on red belly shirts and sticking their heads in honey jars to give talks about Xi Jinpeng in the future.
I don't care about downvotes. Imagine posting something and looking at the downvotes and thinking "oh golly gosh people don't like my opinion".
I also don't care whether you think my comment "paints me in a good light", or that I sound like a capitalist.
Lemmy users skew pretty hard towards young progressive anti-everything users that pick up these little factoids like "HR is there to protect the company" and rely on them as a prism through which to interpret the world.
No one who has ever interacted with HR thinks that they are fairy god-mother types you can snitch to and they'll fire your boss, but they're part of the context in which most people will spend their entire working lives, and people who understand how to navigate them will do better than those who do not.
I'll admit that the "burger flipper level reasoning" is gratuitous. I flipped burgers (but not for macdonalds) 20 years ago. I guess it is classist, but younger me absolutely falls into the "class" that I'm making fun of.
You're also welcome to frame me as capitalist because we all are and sadly it's naive to think you can be anything else. I voted for our socialist party in the recent Australian election. They won the election in a landslide, and while they have some "socialist" policies I suffer no illusions that I continue to reside in a capitalist reality.
Please spare me your strongman, "sticks and stones may break my bones" schtick. I'm not talking about soft shit like that.
I was addressing you from the standpoint of workshopping potential reasons why your attempt at persuasion was facing pushback (in the form of downvotes). My expectation was that, if you wanted to persuade people to adopt your method of HR interaction, you should package it in a palatable way. You seem to subscribe to the "shit yourself in public, stomp around aggressively, and then try convince people by saying do ya get it yet? you smellin' what I'm steppin' in?" school of communication.
One thing I will agree with you about is that I was imprecise with my words. I've used money, so I am a capitalist. Guess I'll die. I meant, and should have said, you seem pro-capitalist. But, as we've already established, you're uninterested in looking good.
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She literally just told you HR didn’t help her in her situation and your answer is to tell her that actually, she was helped and her silly little girl brain just didn’t realize it?
I know that you didn’t do it on purpose, but I implore you to do some self-reflection and start believing women when they speak of their struggles instead of dismissing them.
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just gonna copy this comment from further down the post
A coworker drunkenly made out with my face at a work event and HR tried to send me to a sexually harassment seminar so I could “learn what sexually assault really is”
Another great quote from that meeting: “if you knew she was a sloppy drunk, why were you hanging out with her?”
Just gonna copy the additional context from the same user:
When the HR director asked me what I wanted to happen to the girl, I told her NOTHING. I don’t want her fired or anything, I don’t even work directly with her. Then she asked why, if I didn’t want anything to happen, I reported it? BITCH I DIDN’T I was going to find a new job and move the fuck on with my life
Kinda sounds like HR doing the kind of HR things I've been talking about.
That doesn't mean HR is staffed with intelligent people who will back up the smaller paycheck.
I work with a lot of HR staff and it amazes me at their lack of ability. Like don't know how to do incredibly basic things in excel, my job is to help with using our products, not very basic data manipulation from exported data.
If you wanted a very obscure one off data extract I might write a SQL script for that, but some requests are met by existing export tools and hiding a column or two in excel.
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Did boss' daughter have an eating disorder, because that's a pretty savage callout.
Either way it's a goddamn amazing comeback.
If boss' daughter did have an eating disorder and the boss is still calling out employees eating habits rudely and unprompted, then maybe a firm dose of reality is overdue.
I'm surprised so many people still don't realize that HR exists to protect the company, not the employee. Yes, since a bad or reckless manager can put the company at significant risk, sometimes they will take the side of the employee, but not because it's their charter.
Everyone uses this cliche. Nobody seems to understand it.
a bad or reckless manager can put the company at significant risk
Yes. In this circumstance, the manager opened the company up to a lawsuit with his comments. It would have protected the company to punish him or have him take some sort of class.
You can just say that HR is usually bad at their jobs. "Protecting the company not the employee" is completely meaningless here.
No, there's more to it than that. Immediately taking the manager to task gives more credence to an employee lawsuit. Their "best" first approach is to talk to the employee, even scold them. What they want is for the issue to go away without the company getting bad press or a legal issue. It's not that they're bad at their job, it's that their job has zero to do with being an employee advocate.
They might also scold the manager, but that will happen off the record and behind closed doors.
Also if someone says something fucked up and you clap back and they report it. YES HR WILL SPEAK TO YOU!
If you want to nail someone with the rulebook you cant respond like two people talking shit on twitter. You have to call them out on what they said respectfully and professionally, preferably with witnesses or go straight to HR.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Its also a big contributor as to why a lot of people think HR are useless. Once you respond in any way that could be considered unprofessional you just made it messy and increased the risk to the company of doing anything other than issuing slap on the wrist warnings.
Take the meme for example, now the company has to make a morality decision on whats worse, an unprompted and inappropriate but not deliberately hurtful comment from a manager vs a deliberate and highly personal barb from an employee to a manager... I can see the warning letters for both of them from here.
What's worse between a manager who's supposed biggest strength is soft skills being fucking terrible at soft skills and being higher in the liability hierarchy or a rank and file employee who clapped back.
Maybe it's just the system always leans towards the company having no wrong doing rather than any kind of sane logic.
The fact that it's called human resources instead of something less dystopian should be a hint. If you want an actual ally as an employee you gotta unionize.
Humans are the resource.
Somewhere along the lines a lot of people in HR and upper management in some companies (cultures) forget that you need people and that you need to listen to then to make it all work
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Sounds like a good reason to unionise.
"Bbb bb but that's communism!"
- the USA, probably
one time i had to interrupt an hr sensitivity seminar because the trainer casually threw down an ethnic slur for me
What the fuck?
Did he not know it was a slur? Was he ignorant, or just plain awful is what I'm wondering?
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So the other day at a metting we had some cupcakes laid out. One worker took three of them (there was 16 cupcakes and 8 of us). I tried to politely call it out. But she freaks out and starts accusing me of giving my daughter an eating disorder (I don't have a daughter). The HR lady was in the room too.
I had an elected official chuck pens at the HR lady and reference her recent weight loss during a training about professional behavior in the workplace. Unironically. But the HR lady laughed it off and then kind of flirted with the elected official and a program manager.
He was already on the way out but it did provide a good orientation for the workplace culture.
I assume they talked to you about your poor grammar and spelling ? What was the outcome ?
Edit: the people downvoting this are promoting, or at least accepting poor education, and trump is the result of a poorly educated society. Think about that next time you say that spelling and grammar don't matter.
Damn there are a lot of ignorance loving fascists here. It's great being able to so easily identify and block every single one of you.
as a huge fan of linguistics, spelling and grammar, I will say this very confidently: in this case, spelling and grammar don't matter even one bit. but if this kind of thing matters so much to you, you should also care about typography and not leave a space before a question mark.
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It is completely normal human behavior to use different dialects of a language with different levels of formality depending on the context. That’s what makes language beautiful and expressive!
Dat is stupid.
I guess dat makes me a trump voter now...
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