The employee:HR relationship is fundamentally adversarial over here. HR's job is to protect the company, including from its own employees. They will throw you under the bus if it benefits the company.
Most people won't run into issues with them, but if you think that someone important to the company's bottom line is behaving inappropriately and you go to HR about it, how would you expect them to react? It's a matter of incentives.
Well of course they are. And just like irredeemable relationships, you need to move on and improve your judgement to avoid a repeat. Bemoaning on Slack achieves nothing.
This is an HR responsibility. You either trust them to avoid and eliminate discrimination or you don't.
No, HRs responsibility is to make sure that legal liability for unlawful discrimination does not get imposed on the company, consistent with other corporate goals.
Actually mitigating discrimination may sometimes be the mechanism for that. Helping management create a smokescreen around acts of discrimination and find pretexts to force out people likely to discredit that smokescreen are also sometimes ways HR does that.
Mistaking HR for your advocate rather than management’s is a dangerous mistake.
At a minimum, they’d need to stop accepting employee referrals (how can they tell if the referrals biased?) and take over the technical interview process.
Also, what happens when an exec elsewhere in the company discriminates against someone? Will HR have the power to unilaterally fire the exec? The CEO? The chairman of the board? How would they even detect the discrimination?
Sadly, declaring that one division of a company will eliminate discrimination doesn’t work. You need the whole company to pull together, though realistically, that won’t work either.
Society as a whole has to decide to solve the problem. Looping around to the article, one of the political parties passed hundreds of bills to disenfranchise minority voters; arguing that minorities should have basic rights is (in the US, at least) politically controversial.
Charitably, I hope the goal is to force my values on the employees, and silence dissent (no bigoted discussions at work).
Invoke Godwin’s Law, and… Done.
Of course now that we all live in Covidland, we've had horror stories of whole business units just getting a pre-recorded message that they no longer work there.
