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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.
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.
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 log l 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.
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.
Yeah but then you get bullied about being reasonable
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.
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.
And if she was the one who first went to HR, the story would have been different is what they are saying.
Seriously?
She said HR wanted to talk to her.
Maybe it didn’t go well because she was labouring under the misconception that HR only protects the company and didn’t understand that in this case it would be trivial to have their interests align with hers.
My comment has nothing to do with ignoring women. Your comment says a lot more about the plight of women than mine. Honestly, one of us really does need to engage in some self reflection.
You might be surprised to find out who the “one of you” is!
That’s the implication of my remark, but it’s not as witty when you spell it out.
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your own interests are often aligned with theirs.
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.
there cannot be alignment because we are in an inherently adversarial relationship.
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.
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:
If you are an employee of a company
[…]
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.
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.
Your in management ain’t you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you saying HR will side with the guy making cup cake comments?
That’s antithetical to the comment I replied to. It can’t be both.
They literally did. Why are you disregarding her account and acting like this is some kind of hypothetical?
That’s not what her account said at all. You’re making up a narrative that doesn’t exist.
No, that’s literally what she said. Get some reading comprehension ffs. HR talked to her instead of the boss who made the rude comment. Read it as many times as you need…
Sorry mate all the comments in this thread are asserting different things.
The screen cap says HR spoke to her.
You’re saying that means that they’ve taken the supervisors side.
That would expose the company to a legal claim, which is the antithesis of what every other comment here says HR is supposed to do.
No, I’m saying a dumb HR worker won’t rattle the cage in which they sit.
How can they protect the company they work for if they can’t stave off a cup cake law suit?
Sounds like a good reason to unionise.
“Bbb bb but that’s communism!”
- the USA, probably
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Humans are the resource.
Exactly. They’re not there for you.
I’m kind of surprised (yes, naively) that some people aren’t even aware enough of the wider culture to think twice about saying things like that.
That’s right. Just imagine that you start a business and you start hiring employees and at some point you have so many employees that it becomes difficult to manage and sometimes the employees start fighting or doing other inappropriate things. So, you hire some other employees to to create an HR department to make sure that your employees don’t become a liability for your company. See?
Who would have imagined that a department called “human resources” wouldn’t have your best interests in mind?
Nah, HR is the employers support. The Union is the employees support.
Check this out, it works: https://www.sverigesingenjorer.se/kollektivavtal/the-swedish-model/
If you think about the phrasing of the title “Human Resources”, it makes sense that they are not your friends.
Let’s look at the definition of the word resource:
resource /rē′sôrs″, -zôrs″, rĭ-sôrs′, -zôrs′/
noun
- Something that is available for use or that can be used for support or help. “The local library is a valuable resource.”
- An available supply, especially of money, that can be drawn on when needed.
Those definitions describe disposable commodities; easily replaceable. The adjective “human” simply refines what type of disposable and replaceable commodities that the department deals with.
If you want someone to be your advocate your best interests at a job, you’ll need to hire a lawyer. In the meantime, make sure you take notes, and follow everything up with an email (bcc your personal email a copy of each correspondence).
If your state allows one-party consent, you can even record conversations; be very aware that despite being legal, it will likely get you fired with prejudice if anybody finds out you’ve been recording them without their knowledge.
It could also be interpreted as “resources for humans”, but you’re spot on
tbh I think that’s kinda the point, it’s corporate doublespeak.
If you want someone to be your advocate your best interests at a job, you’ll need to hire a lawyer.
You can also join a union.
You’re right. But it’s not feasible for everyone. e.g. As a North Carolina state employee, I am legally not allowed to join a union.
That’s why forward-looking and thoughtful tech companies call them “People ops,” which changes absolutely nothing about what they do.
“The local library is a valuable resource.”
I wouldn’t call the local library a disposable commodity.
Where I’m working they rebranded HR to ✨“People & Culture”✨ so I don’t know what you mean. With that name, they simply must have our best interests in mind instead of always siding with the higher ranking individual.
Weird, at my company they changed it to “flesh asset repair and removal.”
Found the meatbag Amazon warehouse employee
Aperture science?
This was a triumph! I’m making a note here, “Huge success!”
Most functional HR departments actually do have the workers best interests at heart, because protecting the company and not screwing over workers usually has a ton of overlap. But HR does a lot more than handle workplace disputes.
I had a boss and mentor who happened to have a hot headed streak. He lost his temper with his boss during a meeting and was brought into a meeting with HR over it. He was able to spin the meeting with HR so it became as much about his boss’s failures to be an effective leader as it was about his inappropriate behavior so it ultimately worked out for him
"If you’re going to start a meeting with fat shaming me, then yes; I am going to fire back. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it yourself.
If you have a problem with that, we can get the lawyers involved and discuss it further."
But I also live somewhere that actually has labour laws and where ‘at-will’ employment is a ridiculous concept. If you want to fire someone (after their three months probation), you’ve gotta have a good reason and you better document it throughly.
“At will” isn’t as magical as people think.
If you terminate an employee without documented cause, you still have to pay them unemployment.
In practice this just means that your documented cause will be fabricated.
It doesn’t really need to be fabricated. It’s stupid easy to build a case to legitimately fire anyone.
Not really. I used to work in management for a major outdoors retail chain and we had employees we desperately wanted to fire because they were lazy and toxic rowards other staff and customers, but since they showed up on time and in uniform corporate wouldn’t let us do it because they didn’t want to pay unemployment.
Being toxic to customers is probably counter indicated in the employee handbook, especially for a retail chain.
Your management could have written them up for it 3 times then fired them, but they couldn’t be bothered to do the paperwork.
they can just say they’re downsizing, or the employee hasn’t been performing well, or any other lie. as long as they don’t specifically mention that you’re being terminated for something illegal you’ll never stand a chance in court.
that being said. record every meeting with hr, they slip up more than you think
That’s simply not true.
If you’re laid off they have to pay unemployment. If you aren’t performing well they have to show records proving it when you file unemployment and they try to deny the claim.
Please don’t talk about topics on which you’re clearly uninformed, because the belief that someon3 can be fired for anything with no recourse keeps people from filing for unemployment when they’re 100% eligible.
All “at will” means is that they can fire you for any reason or no reason. They may still be required to pay unemployment, but they don’t have to keep you on staff.
I’m in PA, so yeah unfortunately this is how it goes. hats off to y’all in states with slightly better laws, but this is how it goes in my state. I speak from personal experience as well as the experience of my friends.
and all that documentation can be easily fabricated or cherry picked to try to make a point that isn’t there.
it doesn’t matter how the system is supposed to work, the laws in this country and PA especially are so fucked that it very rarely works out in the employees favor. you can potentially get unemployment, but wrongful termination suits very rarely go anywhere.
No, that’s not how it works in PA or any state.
You’re incorrect regarding unemployment eligibility as it relates to at-will employment status, and since you don’t know what you’re talking about you need to shut the fuck up before you discourage people from even attempting to pursue their rights when they lose their job.
lol. you sound like someone who has never tried to file for any of that shit. from another one of your comments, sounds like you had some corporate experience in firing people.
your experience in the corporate world firing people is not what people on the other side of the axe experience.
people should absolutely file for unemployment and pursue wrongful termination suits if possible. but your expectation that things will fall into their lap is unrealistic and will cost people money if they lose an appeal and are required to pay their benefits back.
Once again, you’re wrong about many, many things.
Filing for unemployment costs nothing. When the company tries to deny the claim, you can appeal that for free, the company is required to provide evidence, and they frequently lose.
Wrongful termination is an entirely different thing than termination without cause and it’s clear that you don’t know that. This is why you need to shut the fuck up and stop telling people to give up when you don’t know what you’re talking about at all.
Saying someone has had quite a few cupcakes isn’t necessarily fatshaming. It can just be calling out someone hogging the cupcakes.
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?”
HR is there to protect the company - not you
Ayyyy~ what the fuck?
It was crazy. What made it worse was that I didn’t even report it…my friend was so upset about it, he told his boss.
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
“I wanted it documented so if she is involved in another incident, this one can be referenced”
That last line is the key take-away for dealing with ANY HR.
Never forget who signs their paychecks.
Yes. The acronym stands for Human Resources and it’d be a stretch to think they consider us human!
Jokes aside, I actually really liked most of the leadership at that company. I really only disliked the CEO and HR director.
On the flip side, corporations are people and have more privileges than you
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?
she seemingly forgot the word “biracial” and decided to go with the first thing on her mind
Was it the word mulatto? That is definitely regional on how offensive it is, or more accurately how offensive it used to be. I didn’t know it could even be considered a slur til I moved 2000 miles away. Again, this was in the late 90s and I know language evolves with time.
If you’re supposed to run a sensitivity training you’d better master the subject and people sensitivities, so this was a 2 x 0 loss
nope! worse :3
Man you got me curious
Oh, shit, apparently I’m nearly as bad. I didn’t realize that was offensive(assuming google even found the right word lol). I absolutely see how it is after thinking about it, though. Thankfully I don’t think I’ve ever actually called anyone that.
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Gy*** or ab*?
Probably called match!! a mutt instead of a goldendoodle.
spoiler
/s obviously, because of the instance posted from and the biracial explanation.
I used to feel bad for Toby that Michael was constantly shitting on him. That is, until I encountered corporate HR. And now I too hate so much about the things that Toby chooses to be.
True lore: in one episode, Toby says that he was actually training to be a priest, but he gave it up to hook up with a woman. (who later left him and is now his ex.) Then he just took the first job that he saw. …almost as if he was guided to it by a higher power?
So canonically Toby is in a living hell because he rejected his god to indulge his fornicatory lust.
Why are you the way you are?
Toby’s from HR, which means he’s not a part of our family. Also he’s divorced so he’s not really a part of his family either.
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.
“Tina, there are six of us. Learn to share”
That’s what I imagined the situation to be at first, her reaction does seem in that situation to be pretty wild
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.
English may not be their first language (since the question mark thing is common in French, for example), though of course if that were true, their comment looks even worse.
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…
Oh come on. Trump has become the new Hitler. How long does it take before completely random topic is brought around to him?
He could be dyslexic.
