Launch of the New Zealand Employment Relations Society

 

SPEECH NOTES

 

THE LAUNCH OF THE NEW ZEALAND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS SOCIETY AUT FACULTY OF BUSINESS AND LAW

 

 

Wakefield Street, Auckland.

 

5.00pm, Friday 26 February 2010

 

ANDREW LITTLE

National Secretary EPMU

 

 

 

Thank you for the opportunity to speak at the launch of the Employment Relations Society.

The term "Employment Relations" seems to be the new name for the discipline variously known in the past as industrial relations, personnel management, even people management and, of course, most ubiquitously now, human resources.  And yet, inside each name there is a world of difference.

"Industrial relations" recognised the importance of relationships and relations in the workplace.  It recognised that there needed to be a relationship - a mutuality - between workers and management directed towards work - industry, if you like -  and, since the term was in vogue at a time when statutorily mandated union coverage, centralised bargaining and union awards were the norm, it also paid respect to the need for good relationships between management and unions.

 "Industrial relations" was a name that was respectful of the human factor, in work and the workplace.  I'll say more about the human factor later.

"Personnel management" as a term focused more on the needs of the individual.  Personnel managers tended to be responsible for hiring and training and development.  It was a role focussed on the staffing and labour needs of the business.

"Human resources" or "human resource management" is something else entirely.  It is, in my view, both as a term and as a practice an insidious discipline.  As a name it gives the appearance of empathy for employees (it is, after all, human) but it's humanity is betrayed by the extraordinarily inhuman word "resource".  It implies workers will be treated as management would deal with any other resource.  It carries with it implications of pliability, malleability, mechanical compliance and disposability, all characteristics of other resources like raw materials or plant and equipment.  Inanimate objects that don't talk back.  HR is in reality just another form of organising, one allied entirely to the interests of the employer or the business owner but desperate to give the pretence that it has employees' interests at heart.

A term such as "people management" is even more cynical and arguably more dangerous.  This is a term that clearly implies an encroachment on the sense of the individual beyond work and the workplace, of the non-worker/non-employee identity. It is about blurring the distinction between the person at work and the person themselves, the person with their own life, and it implies an enlargement of the manager's role beyond the workplace.  It is an interference in the individual.

In this sense the term "human resources" and the term "people manager" suffer from a massive conceit, that somehow the employer or management can or should exert an influence over the individual employee beyond ensuring a safe and satisfactory place of work and good recognition for a job well done.  They are terms that are ultimately disempowering and which diminish the whole person.  They are about subjugating the real person in favour of the person as an economic being.

Language is important.  Which is why it is encouraging to see the Society being established and that it uses the term "employment relations" which locates itself carefully as being about work and the relationships in work.  Amongst its purposes is one to foster discussion, research and education in the field of employment relations.  We could do with a lot more of this. 

If I am critical of one thing about modern HR, it is its essentially deceptive nature.  It is a discipline that has spawned an entirely new language, most of it meaningless and much of it utterly misleading.  Take, for example, attempts today to describe workers.  We see them referred to as "associates", "partners", "people capital", even "labour units".

The reference to workers as associates and partners could not be more misleading.  It implies that workers have a stake in the business beyond their obligation to provide their skills and labour.  It places an assumed level of ownership risk on workers.  But workers don't take that risk.  And they don't share in the rewards of any business risk.  The other terms I have referred to, "labour units" and "people capital", are simply dehumanising.  I suppose it makes it easier if you are a human resources manager responsible for effecting massive redundancies or simply dismissing an individual or making decisions which have a direct impact on workers' day to day lives and their job satisfaction to be able to refer to them as labour units and people capital.  There is no recognition of humanity in those terms; a labour unit, much like a product unit or even a business unit, has no feelings.  And as for people capital, this implies notions of asset depreciation, even degradation, and straight line returns on value.  Again, it is the human being reduced to an economic unit.

There is other language used by HR practitioners designed to mislead and deceive.  Such as the term "right sizing" for mass redundancies.  Or "out-sourcing" for giving a worker's job to another outfit, most commonly overseas, and causing job losses locally. The conceit of HR is that if we use pretty language we can conceal the reality of what is happening.

 

HR has brought us pointless concepts like "benchmarking", which is about looking at what others are doing and trying to do the same; benchmarking is about pursuing the heights of mediocrity. HR has brought us the idea of performance pay, an idea based on the premise that the efforts and contribution of a single worker can make a demonstrable difference and that that difference can be discerned and distinguished from the efforts of others. The truth is that performance pay can do no such thing and can only reward on an exclusively subjectively-viewed basis. And don't get me started on attempts to introduce science into the art of wage setting and relativity through demotivational systems like Hayes. 

These are the contributions of HR to the management of working people.

The challenge for the Employment Relations Society and, indeed, for the academic study of how workers and managers achieve productive ends is really about understanding that pursuing these economic objectives requires a respectful understanding of basic human drivers.

I talked before about the human factor. Let me put this important consideration into context.

Some who have been around workplace issues for a long time - certainly, a lot longer than me - remember a time (whether accurately or not) of great rigidity when workers, through their unions, using the laws of the day insisted on orderly, if dogmatic, procedures for managing work and getting a fair reward for work.  Arguing the toss, even going on strike, over things like restrictions on hours of work, overtime rates of pay, special allowances, holidays and so on was a demand for the recognition of human needs and human limitations  But there were extremes and indulgent behaviour, and sometimes these were disrespectful of the rights and interests of workers.  The approach built deep resentment amongst many business owners, large and small, and amongst many workers, too.  Significant and hugely disruptive disputes drew much public attention. 

The failure of those times (and it was not all a failure) was a product of the failure to recognise the human factor.  A failure to recognise that what people want from work is actually pretty basic: to be treated fairly as amongst their work colleagues, even as amongst fellow workers in the same industry; to not be discriminated against; to be treated with dignity and respect, including respecting the choice to form or belong to a union;  to be recognised; to be able to work harmoniously with their workmates; the understanding that while management has a critical role to play and critical responsibilities to discharge, that it is not antithetical to the notion of management that workers have a say on things that affect them directly.

There might also be a recognition that the reality of work and the workplace and of any business, certainly of any substance, is that it does not work or is not successful on the efforts of one person alone.  Businesses are successful because everybody in it knows their role, knows each other's role, feels valued as workers and as human beings and are rewarded fairly and equitably.  There is no such thing as the hero manager, as Paul Reynolds and many other over-paid, bloated chief executives of large corporate's are rapidly finding out.  There is no place for rank individualism in the workplace - businesses would collapse if it were allowed.

Business is another form of organising; it organises people and resources.  But the common law has always privileged business the minute it employs a worker.  The common law confirms employment is a constraint on individual freedom. The law imposes duties and obligations on the worker: the duty to obey; the duty to devote your skills and talents to the business, to be faithful to the business. Statute law, on the other hand, has generally ensured that common law obligations are not the basis of further exploitation.

In the last 30 years in the West, as we have abandoned old rigidities, we have replaced them with new ones - for example, the encouragement of the wholesale transfer of power in the employment relationship to business.  And the new rigidities are equally ignorant of the human factor as the last.

It is not only the language and practice of modern HR that dehumanises.  It is the contemporary fashionable urge to undo the limited protections in place for working people - the demand to repeal our fair dismissal laws and place in employers' hands the right to arbitrarily remove a worker's economic livelihood.  It is the new form of labour exploitation - compelling workers to become independent or dependent contractors, with all the vulnerability and loss of rights this entails.

The Employment Relations Society creates a great new opportunity to enter into a new discourse and a new understanding about work, about workplace relationships and about those who are integrally involved in it - workers, management and unions.

I look forward to the contributions that the Society will make and to the debates they will be in a position to generate.

Congratulations and good luck.