Handling HR

Human Resources (HR) has become an industry all of itself and one of the fastest growing in the UK in recent years in terms of the numbers it employs within public and private sector organisations

But the shine may well be coming off in the private and public corporate world – as many of the misgivings and warnings about treating workers as just another "resource" expressed by union builders over 30 years ago become more widely recognised.

A recent critical article by Pamela Dow in the New Statesman (HR Britain: how human resources captured the nation - New Statesman) reported that, according to Labour Force Study data, HR employed around 476,000 people up to 2024. This grew to over 500,000 in 2025, nearly double the number employed of 284,000 in 2010. In comparison, again in 2024, there were 367,300 nurses in the NHS, 375,000 lawyers and 285,000 Doctors. Seniority of HR professionals within organisations is also key change and HR Directors on Boards hit 85% by 2017 and over 70% of FTSE Executive grouping  have a Chief HR officer.

The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD), based in the UK, has become the global awarding body for HR professionals – putting the UK in the driving seat in terms of both supply and demand for an entire industry. A successful industrial story for UK Plc? Maybe.  Except that, during exactly the same period when the number of HR professionals doubled, so too did the number of workplace abuse cases handled by Employment Tribunals and the number of days lost to illness.

It appears from these figures that the more HR staff there are and the closer to the centre of corporate control HR ideology gets, the more numerous the conflicts between workers and managers. And also concerning to many, CIPD seem to have little ability, power or interest in regulating the profession it represents - with no recorded cases that can be found of CIPD accreditation being withdraw from a HR practitioner for malpractice.

The New Statesman article, despite apparently written from the perspective of a challenge to “woke” culture at work, still goes some way to analysing what it is about HR ideology that has made it an increasing cultural problem in workplaces. What the article lacks is the perspective on HR from workers themselves and union builders in particular. This analysis points to what feels wrong with HR culture to workers and points to the steps union builders can take to counter it

HR professionals, in many union builders experience, are a mixed bunch, as people are in any industry, and many are decent people trying to make the world a better place in the situation they find themselves in, working to comply with the professional codes of CIPD. But the numbers published in the New Statement article are stark and HR as an industry should be challenged to account for itself in the same way any other industry group would be. 

If HR is, as it appears to be, failing on its own terms and has actually increased conflict at work, rather than reduced it, then what does that say about its legitimacy as an industry? 

A helpful starting point for answering that question is to analyse  and set out the ideology of Human Resources. Like many industries, HR has its own language and codes, its sacred texts and gurus elevated above mere mortals. Expect to hear words in its mantras such as "synergy", "flexibility", "well being" and "belonging" far more than "compliance", "consistency", "compassion" or "transparency"

The roots of the issue lie in the decisive shift, made in the 1980s, away from the staff welfare approach of Personnel Departments carried out on a semi independent basis, and responding to change as a part of the management process. Complemented by a move towards Human Resources as a top down agent of and shaper of change for senior managers and Directors within the organisation. With seats on the Board and full membership of Senior Leadership Teams, HR Departments represent senior managers within the workforce and not the workforce within senior management

Apologists for the evolution to HR argue that, the previous approach by Personnel of seeking to balance opposing forces at work, often failed to align staff with the strategic objectives of the organisation as defined by the senior leadership. HR approaches on the other hand, it is said, help fit the workforce into the employer’s future needs in a more strategic way, while also achieving better job satisfaction for employees as a result, it is claimed.

In other words, the Personnel approach of brokering conflict resolution at work implies an understanding of the basic class tensions in the workplace and seeks to administer compliance with employment law by the whole organisation. While HR ideology acts to obscure these class tensions by a propaganda of equal treatment under policies that attempt to deny external and internal systems of power and hierarchy.  A common example often reported is HR acknowledging that workplace stress is an issue but responding with offers of well being days or stress counselling for workers - in order to shift responsibility to the worker from the employer causing the stress. In these ways systemic issues can be obscured and workers themselves blamed for their own exploitation

For union builders HR is best seen as an operation that has an explicit aim of making sure each workplace issue becomes a matter between the individual worker and the organisation with no place for collective sharing or pattern analysis. Union builders set out to collectivise each workplace issue to build practical solidarities between staff. Union builders and HR are therefor on a collision course of ideas at all times

HR often suffers the effects of believing its delusional propaganda that all employees are equal in the eyes of the organisation and no power imbalance exists. And further that writing an endless stack of HR policies, (or downloading them from CIPD) equates to being an objective and neutral player. Personnel on the other hand, despite its faults, was a culture of compliance with employment law and of policing the employer-employee relationship to offset this natural conflict in a relational way and with a degree of consent on all sides.

Many cases exist of staff in organisations approaching HR for help, only to find themselves the subject of a grievance from a colleague as a result. Many more report senior managers being apparently immune to HR policies, of HR policies being weaponised and used as a tool for bullying and harassment through procedural abuse, and of HR staff in general having little interest in enforcement or protection of junior staff from these behaviours by their senior management peers. Individualising every issue makes HR staff blind to and so potentially complicit in structural discrimination based on peoples protected characteristics. At its worst a hierarchy of competing protected characteristics can form and become the lens through which organisational dynamics are analysed, setting worker against worker.

In Pamela Dow’s description of HR culture and ideology in the public sector she asks: “Why were so many employee grievances settled at such great expense, before and after employment tribunals? Because there were so many transgressions of HR policy, often by the very people who had codified the rules.”

HR is incurious, blind and deaf to the realities outside its department and collective dynamics of the organisation. When events occur that it cannot explain, HR has often set out to bring in external experts or lawyers to report on these collective dynamics for serious sums of money, and then weaponise their findings. Staff could have told a more accurate story for free if asked by a more curious HR Department

HR focusses almost all its gaze on Senior Leaders objectives, becoming institutionally defensive and often driving paranoia on behalf of the employer. It can can be hostile and aggressive to any criticism of the organisation, often seeking to punish and silence dissent through seeking to recover legal costs from those who unsuccessfully challenge it, or through the blanket use of NDA gagging clauses in settlement agreements as people leave. HR ideology rarely exhibits and models corporate self confidence

In these ways HR is focussed on self perpetuation and constant replication/expansion of itself through ever more policies and processes. Its expansion – and impending staff replacement through AI automation - is easily explained in this way.

In a recent OfaC blog (msmithorganiser.wixsite.com/organisingforachange/post/anti-union-bosses) we discussed how employers seek to deploy a range of tactics to defeat union building. Many of these tactics sit within the pretentions, culture and ideology of Human Resources and are deployed at working people to divide them rather than on the basis of consent. In this way the Human Resources approach weaponises staff management, often amplifying individual grievances in competition with each other and  seeking undermining the collective spirit union builders seek to create.

In many organisations, taking an issue to HR for counselling, coaching or advice, and sharing personal information, is the same as taking it to your organisation’s senior management. Anything you say may well be recorded and deployed against you, leaving you stranded in a HR process you triggered by seeking help. Few HR Departments have an explicit confidentiality policy for staff and fail to make this clear. Once your employer considers you a company resource to be maintained and managed, no different to the furniture or work equipment, this lack of confidentiality within HR seems quite normal and justified in the same way that reporting a table leg is damaged – and can be admired and rewarded within HR culture.

The Human Resources approach is policy and process driven – with the seeming aim of an “industry standard” full policy set on everything it can dream up on the basis that if the organisation has a problem, then we have a policy for that. Its weakness is an absence of compliance and enforcement of those policies equally across an organisation – in many organisations deploying HR policy mostly towards junior staff. With HR as a tool of senior management to be deployed to drive the change they desire, you are far more likely to have HR interfere in your work and personal life the lower down the scale of seniority you find yourself. When HR culture promotes an alternative reality that its policy set is blind and applies equally to all, underlying toxic cultures and often bullying and harassment are amplified rather than offset.

It’s extremely rare to hear Human Resource staff arguing for not applying an internal policy or process given the specific circumstances of a case. HR enjoys and celebrates an obsession with the primacy of process over outcome – often amplifying workplace friction by seeking and finding a HR policy to apply, and a process to follow in every case. Its core claim to be centrally aligning staff performance to the organisation's core aims often proves false, as the processes exacerbate and prolong conflict and division more often than not.

Union builders can exploit this obsession with policies and processes rather than outcomes to demonstrate how the employer’s interests are always opposed to the workforce. Union builders themselves can take on the role of policing and enforcing the policy set and hold the employer to account to the letter of its own policy. Understanding however that a seemingly endless and circular HR process is in itself not an accident and explicitly designed as a safety valve to let the steam out slowly from any wider workplace dispute. Rigid time limits should be fought for in every HR policy "agreed" at the workplace

Recent analysis lists Human Resources operations as having a likely high place in the first group of industrial processes that will be automated by large language model algorithms of AI. As a process and policy-driven culture, with pretensions to be objectively applying policy sets blind to circumstance or input and resistant to policing - it is of course a gift for automated machine learning and digital delivery.

Union builders learned from the digital HR development in the 2010s in the logistics and care sectors, with the move to automated digital shift rostering and automated digital performance and attendance management. Discussions are underway on the best approach union builders can take to build collectively as the next wave of digital HR develops - automated disciplinary procedures, automated redundancy management and automated surge payroll systems and pay grading evaluation - where responsibility is disowned and delegated to an algorithm by senior managers.

Just as understanding how piece rates and earnings were calculated in a nineteenth century cotton mill in Lancashire was the start of building collective bargaining through union building – so in this century our first industrial demand has to be transparency of the algorithms managing us at work.

It is likely though that current HR culture will first be embedded in machine learning artificial intelligence models administered by HR people, shortly afterwards becoming a fully automated function where “the computer says no”

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