Why Human Resources departments should really be called "Litigation Services"

There is no such thing as a Human Resource Professional any more.

Before 1985 (or so) most Human Resource professionals , then called Personnel department heads, were graduates of college with an emphasis on things like training, education, social services, personnel degrees, humanities courses, etc.

After 1985 (or so), at about the same time that laws were starting to change which governed a companies conduct, and gave employees more defined rights under the law, a shift started to occur.

At about that time , (give or take a few years) depending upon how astute a company was at recognizing the changes at hand, the Human Resource professional was born. Their educational track was similar to the personnel professional with a few important differences. First , they still had a leaning towards training and education however the vast majority of those folks also were trained in specialties like labor law, EEO compliance, gender studies, racial diversity and the like.

That shift in itself was not necessarily a bad thing. Most would agree that the era defined by the period of time between 1950-1985 in corporate America was dominated by an attitude of arrogance and indifference towards employees. Most places had all white male upper management, and women , other races, and foreigners were relegated to positions which were classified as support staff. In some cases a companies conduct was illegal both in their policies towards women and towards other races. Also wrong was the way they approached education, hiring and training.

When all these updated (and new) laws were passed companies understood they needed to do some things different in order to comply with those laws and reduce their legal exposures.

Thus, the Human resource Professional was born.

What's the difference between a Personnel Director and a Human Resource Professional, you might ask? Well, the biggest one is that while the exterior functions would appear to be about the same (recruiting, education, training, etc), the interior functions changed dramatically. Interior functions are those responsibilities performed out of sight of the common employee. Pro-active defensive strategies like Pre-Employment arbitration agreements, reduced employee benefits, legally defensible job descriptions, back to work light duty rules and aggressive non-union strategies were all a result of this shift.

Prior to this, most of those decisions were handled by upper management with no real training in how to defend the company in court. It was usually just left to the lawyer to figure out later how to act on a complaint after it was received and defend what the company had already done.

Today most HR departments should really be named "Litigation Defense Services". Their real job is to reduce the amount of monies paid to defend lawsuits and to defend the companies policies and business practices from outside reviews like the NLRB, the EEOC, violations of the ADA and other entities governmental or other wise, which are very costly to defend and very damaging to a companies image and bottom line if they lose.

Policies in corporate America today are driven by these departments and more often than not the decisions are driven by lawyers and not by conscience. Current policy creation is not driven by a company going the extra mile and doing the right thing for their employees, they are not driven by morality, they are now almost exclusively driven by comprehensive defensive legal strategies.

This is the biggest difference and is the reality in modern America. In today's America, the HR department does not look first to defend the employee when they are wronged. Their first job is to defend the company. Make a complaint to your HR department and the first thing they look at is you, the complainer. File a charge of harassment and the first thing the discussion centers around is not the charge but your actions and conduct, leading up to the incident . Pretty much, hire an attorney to defend you, and you are not welcome at work any more.

You may still work there, technically, but your time is limited. You are done until the complaint is resolved.

After it is resolved, the scrutiny you will endure will be hard to imagine.

Here is two examples I witnessed first hand.

Both actually happened and while not really typical of of how things go day to day in most companies, it does point out how ridiculous things have gotten.

• A female restaurant manager had surgery for breast cancer. The company wanted her to return to work after 10 days, thereby limiting their insurance exposure. She resisted and got her doctor to write her an excuse limiting her work days, hours of work and had some restrictions attached like weight she could lift, hours she could work, etc. From my point of view what's another two weeks? She would have returned to work in two more weeks , back to her normal job and everything would have went back to normal. Her boss got on the phone and insisted very strongly she had to come back to work, in some capacity, doing anything even if it was just sitting in a chair observing the store while another manager ran the unit. He basically told her he didn't give a damn what the doctor said, she had to come back to work or he would replace her and get rid of her. He would fire her for having cancer because she was forcing him to run her restaurant, in her absence. She resisted his direction ,reported her boss to HR for pressuring her to come back to work even though she had severe restrictions in place from her doctor. While talking with the HR representative they made it clear that they were going to support the boss and his decision, so she hired an attorney to protect her. What was the companies response? They designed a work schedule that lived just inside the doctors orders, and scheduled her to work 5 days a week from 1 am to 6 am , in a restaurant that was not normally open after midnight. Then the supervisor stood and waited for her to show up every day and was there when she was scheduled off every day and verified personally whether she met the schedule or not. Her attorney advised her not to show up as he felt they had a strong case for claim and she could win a settlement. She didn't work and they fired her. Once she lost her job, the attorney bailed because she couldn't come up with his fee. The company got exactly what they wanted and she lost everything. She filed complaint after complaint with any agency that would listen. It took more than 10 years to wind its way through the maze of legalities and in the end, eve though she prevailed it cost her everything. She lost her house, her insurance and her job and died 6 months later. The HR director was also a lawyer and he is still employed in the same capacity.

• In another case, a male plant worker got very sick and was hospitalized. After hospitalization, the doctor ordered bed rest and severely limited duty for some 90-120 days. The company through its HR department, directed the insurer to withhold payment after 90 days because the employee had used all his short term disability and was not paying his premiums for long term disability. They never contacted the employee directly because the work rules in place in the facility allowed the company to direct communication to the employees supervisor and to place any written notices in the employees in house mailbox as a substitute for telephone or direct mail communication. Their logic was that even though the employee never received the communication, because he was at home and very sick, it was not their fault he never received it because they followed their own rules. It didn't matter that the employee could not receive it because he was off sick and could not get past the guard shack to retrieve it because he was not an active employee with a valid pass. He should have known to have it checked for correspondence from the company and because the supervisor was available by phone he should have known to call and ask about it. Both of these rules were contained in a company handbook the employee received at orientation 2 years earlier and is the only place these policies were posted. Once the bills started rolling in 5 or 6 months later and the employee called the HR department to find out why, the company advised him it was because he did not pay his long term disability insurance premiums as requested through inter-company mail. They then advised him that because he had not contacted the company in the requested amount of time, that his employment was ended "administratively" one month prior to his phone call. The effect was that he got sick , and because he got sick he got fired, a month before he knew anything about it. How he found out something was up is that he got a COBRA notice in the mail. Out of work, with no insurance and with no job, and according to his company it was his fault for not responding to their letters they never sent him.

I'm sure that many people would disagree with me about my opinions expressed here.

I am also positive that there are many examples of where the employee was protected and the company did the right moral thing in helping their employee.

The point is you should not for one moment think that your companies HR department is there to protect you.

They are there to protect the company, sometimes at all costs.

I heard a CEO of one company say one day " We never settle anymore. Settlements set precedents. Precedents cost money. I'd rather pay the lawyer."

Keep that in mind the next time you think about going to HR with a problem at work.

You could be next.

Thankx- bigmike

posted from "The Rant from bigmike" at

http://bigmikerant.blogspot.com/

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