The Problem With Human Resources - Mockingbird

The Problem With Human Resources - Mockingbird

"My friend knew it was harassment, but didn't trust HR to handle the matter. Nobody did -- in her working class department, everyone had been through the same training, and had written off HR as an enemy. Desperate for freedom, my friend found a position in another department, and hoping to make a change as she left, she filed an HR grievance on the way out the door. Her grievance uncovered a trail of harassment that included testimonies of nearly a dozen other women, all of whom could have reported the man, but none of them trusted HR to do anything about it. The man in question was fired, but he might have been fired sooner if the general consensus among the campus working class was that HR only cared if race or sexual orientation were involved. Every institution has trouble garnering trust from its employees, but commitments to ineffective moral frameworks make the problem worse.

"Say what you will about Christianity, but it's been a historic catalyst of achieving the goals that HR programs aim for. Its initial spread came through the underclass of slaves, women, and the poor throughout the Roman Empire, developing one of the world's first truly extranational communities. Its adherents established the first hospitals to take care of the sick and elderly. It became a champion of literacy so that normal people could have direct access to its sacred texts (and reform its own corrupt religious hierarchy). Whether it's the end of chattel slavery, the American civil rights movement, the decolonization of the British empire, or the end of South African apartheid, the moral logic of Christianity has historically been a tool of the dispossessed to challenge their oppressors. Why has Christianity been successful in this way? One imagines that its success is, in no small part, due to the fact it allows for all sins, including oppression, to be expiated as water under a bridge."