The Role Of Human Resources

There is supposed to not be any legal mandate to have a Human Resources department in an American company, but the role will have to be played to some extent by someone.  As the person or group within a business that presides over hiring, training (though separate managers or employees might actually carry training out), and worker support as a whole, if an official HR representative is not the one doing such things, some other manager or authority figure must perform tasks like hiring, without which there could be no company beyond a sole proprietorship of the strictest sense.  This role can be used to protect employers and their profits or reputation and thus to hurt workers, to protect workers from exploitation by employers, or to further the interests of both employers and employees and thus promote the wellbeing of the company as a whole.

It is HR that needs to be consulted for information about compensation, worker benefits, opportunities for new roles, and general company policies in numerous cases, and yet HR personnel who so choose can use their position within a company to hinder the interests of workers for various reasons.  No, that this branch is called Human Resources because workers are regarded as human "resources" is not itself dehumanizing, nor is it by necessity attached to the idea that employees are nothing more than sources of productivity for a company to be tossed aside when a more efficient source comes along.  It is just that HR might do either the bare minimum to ensure a company is treating employees as is legally demanded, as opposed to a manner that is rational or morally just regardless of a country's laws, or function to salvage situations that could reflect poorly on employers.

There could be HR divisions/representatives that try to put on the outward guise of being helpful to employees and looking out for their interests, only to have the true goal of protecting upper management or public perception of the company.  The human resources of the company are in this instance not being treated as conscious beings with moral rights, but as a means to the end of serving the company that can be dismissed or trampled on at any time it would benefit the organization.  This, of course, does not reflect the inherent nature of HR as a division within a company, but it is a very legitimate possibility that HR teams/leaders of certain companies will resemble this more than the caring persona they would likely still try to show workers.  Rather than delivering workers from unsafe conditions or exploitative pay, they might just try to keep upper management content at the expense of rationality and justice.

Nothing at all is contradictory about the goals of trying to protect the company from unecessary trouble and protecting the interests of every worker.  There is nothing about HR which makes it logically necessary that the basic functions are just a tool to cover up or conduct more workplace exploitation.  It is when an HR department tries to protect the company as a whole by ignoring, contributing to, or trivializing the mistreatment of workers that these two objectives are not being pursued simultaneously.  There is also the fact that HR figures can also be subject to mistreatment from those above them.  This would not justify any irrationality or oppression on their part, but it could be a factor in some situations.  Workplace exploitation can have targets that are not commonly recognized as such even as the role of Human Resources is used to protect a system of cruelty.

It simply is not true that all HR members must be deeply concerned with employee flourishing for its own sake or with blindly preserving corrupt hierarchies.  Like all things about a business structure, HR can be used to just conceal or further the oppression of those who have the least amount of power in a company, as well as of those with more power than this who are still themselves being oppressed by upper hierarchy figures or a malevolent work environment.  It could also be used to genuinely promote employee interests or to promote worker interests and those of management at once.  Which one an HR representative will choose to do depends on their worldview, the state of the company culture, and whether the representative will encourage the culture as it is for better or for worse.  Reductionistic conservative ideas about the supposed total goodness of American capitalism and reductionistic liberal ideas about the supposed inevitability of workplace exploitation are assumed, not proven, and they cannot be proven true because they are contrary to reality.