this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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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 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
Because then they fire you.
They can't fire you, what are they going to fire you for?
If it goes to an employment tribunal then you simply say "I was not been uncooperative I simply was upholding the rules they require me to uphold, do not touch the grapes without protection." Now they're stuck.
Then the judge slaps them with an unfair dismissal and you get several years wage compensation and the company looks awful in front of the judge. Possibly a safety violation fine as well.
Lol, that's not how things work at all, at least here in the US. They'd just say they fired you for an unrelated reason. And if you took it to court, good luck affording a lawyer that can compete with their team, while being unemployed. Extremely unlikely that the little guy wins there.
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
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.
I'm not trying to persuade anyone, I'm just calling out idiocy as I see it.
That said, I notice my comments have provoked some discussion about what HR does.
unless you make money by owning things, you're still the same class that you were when you were flipping burgers
So my original comment that was apparently "classist" was actually self deprecation.
I mean, yeah. You have more in common with burger-flippers doing wrong-think than you do with people who own things for a living. "Middle Class" is ultimately a meaningless term that obscures that reality.
That's... not entirely true.
Although, I'm not about to start making assertions about my financial circumstances in a silly point scoring exercise.
HR is there to ensure the company works. They will answer questions you have, they will change your name in the system if its necessary, they will help you out if you need something that aligns with the interests of company. They're not inherently bad people.
They are NOT the ones to go to when a conflict requires solving. It's literally not part of their job. That's what the works council is for. Don't have a works council? You're on your own.
That's just not true in most organisations.
Sure, you shouldn't expect them to solve your problems, and you should only engage with them as a considered measure in the course of solving your problems, but they're an integral part in many solutions.
For example, if you're going to make a claim against your employer you need to have them document things, preferably a pattern.
wut
no, that is horrible advice
This type of claim is always more successful if you can demonstrate that the defendant had an opportunity to mitigate but did not do so.
You can't expect a settlement if you're just secretly hoarding all your evidence and not following the established procedures in order to address them.
you have 3 options
put up with it
quit
get a lawyer
telling hr just gives them time to fire you for ‘cause’
False.
A lawyer will tell you to collect evidence, including HR's response.
yea after the lawyer
Bruh stfu lmao dork
You know the entire world doesn't need to know about your four brain cells, you can of course just keep that quiet.
It's rare I see someone I can block so readily. But even a cursory glance at your profile says we don't get along.
Seriously? If you are an employee of a company all you want to do is your job and then go home preferably after receiving a pay rise that didn't require additional work on your behalf. The company's interests however are to get as much work out of me as possible for as little compensation as possible.
The interests of myself and the interests of the company are diametrically opposed, there cannot be alignment because we are in an inherently adversarial relationship.
It's like claiming that your interests and your landlords interests align, and then completely ignoring the fact that you can never get him to come around and fix the broken light fixture. The thing I want him to do is the one the thing that he definitely doesn't want to do.
Most jobs aren't like this.
Regardless, if your being bullied by your supervisor then HR wants that to stop in order to minimise their litigation risk, so your interests are aligned.
Your in management ain't you.
If there's 5 billion people working age, and 2% of workplaces are like this, how many people are effected?
The comment I replied to is a generalisation:
Your "generalization" comment is dumb.
These conversations are always about the lowest common denominator. At that end of the spectrum, you are flat wrong. All your comments tell everyone else you are either hopelessly ignorant or lucky and ignorant.
No your comment is dumb.
just gonna copy this comment from further down the post
Just gonna copy the additional context from the same user:
Kinda sounds like HR doing the kind of HR things I've been talking about.