diversity hires

Tom Woods Commenter Dialog: “Death by HR”

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations]

The Tom Woods podcast on Death by HR is here, and on Youtube here.

On Tom Woods’ site, a commenter with a long career in HR had a number of criticisms of the interview, though he had not actually bothered to read the book — the HR version of “skim until offended,” jumping to conclusions about the content of the book and spending more time criticizing and reacting than looking deeper. But he had a lot of interesting things to say about his career, apparently working in mostly smaller and poorly-managed companies where managers frequently used their position to act arbitrarily based on ethnic, racial, or sexual prejudices, or put their own satisfaction ahead of company goals.

 

  • Perhaps if Tom Woods wants someone to evaluate the HR function from a libertarian or Austrian Economic perspective, he should actually talk to someone who has worked in the field? Next week, an exposé on the internal waste at NASA, the guest will be a jack hammer operator from Arkansas, who obviously has the inside scoop…

    I’ve worked in HR and recruiting for over a decade now. Like any other department you’ll find in a company, it can be staffed with idiots or geniuses, but mostly it’s people who are somewhere in between. There are more than a few issues this guest brought up which are complete BS.

    One, performance evaluations and legal risk. First, the legal risk for employers viz a viz their employees is next to zero in the US. With the exception of California, if you ask an actual labor lawyer if you can or should sue for X, Y, or Z, they will almost unanimously tell you that you can’t, or you can try but you won’t likely win. If you’re a member of a protected class, say a minority, and you have your boss on tape screaming racial epithets at you for hours on end before firing you, you might have a case. In this instance if they do have those performance evaluations they can use those to prove you were fired for legitimate reasons. And, unless you have a slam dunk case, no lawyer is going to take your suit on spec, so you’d better have a few grand to float as a retainer, and even if you win, the judgement won’t be as impressive as many assume.

    So for all practical purposes most people wanting to take advantage of the few laws that actually do offer some form of legal protectionism to labor in the US are &^% out of luck. Generally speaking, the answer lawyers will give you is yes, you can be fired for that, or like that, or abused or even physically assaulted at work (I’ve seen it happen multiple times), and you generally won’t have luck suing, unless you’re in California which has laws which diverge significantly from the rest of the US.

    In the above case the performance evaluation does serve the purpose the guest was mentioning, however in over a decade of experience I’ve seen them save more jobs than justify terminations. My favorite example was an employee who was moved through the process of disciplinary action to the point of being fired, the company at that time kept HR out of the process as much as possible, until the end where we came in to make sure everything was kosher. The employee was a woman with a very hard to find skillset at that point, because we were a manufacturer and there was little to no manufacturing left in our area. What was all the fuss about? It turns out the manager didn’t like the way she was opening, positioning, and sizing her email windows on her computer while she was doing her job. He had a process, ya’ see, and it involved micromanaging the movements of her frigging mouse. Her actual performance</i.>alsotolerate working for and with this moron.

    That is one example of a multitude I could lay out, which addresses another claim of this guest: managers know what they’re doing, and how to evaluate and reward their employees. After ten plus years of experience, to say I beg to differ is to put it mildly. In fact, that’s one of the most riduclously detatched from reality statements I’ve heard in my entire life. Most managers are just regular employees who were promoted. No one ever checked to see if they wanted to be managers, and often when they did want to be, it was because they didn’t see any other career progression, and so assumed they had to be managers. No one ever checked to see if they had any aptitude for the position, either. They were just the best at their job in someone’s estimation, and God only knows if that person had any particular skill in managing people, and that person clapped them on the shoulder one day and said, “Congrats, kid, you’re in charge now, so good luck!” Rarely if ever is any training even offered to these people, check corporate training budgets. They’ve gone through the floor over recent years. In my entire career I’ve met three or four managers who actually had a clue what they were doing, and I’ve worked with hundreds at this point, maybe over a thousand; directly for a few and with many more as an HR and recruiting person.

    In my years of experience the biggest problem I’ve had to deal with in HR and recruiting is not government compliance, which is an annoyance and yes, sometimes a big one, but rarely more than that. Nor has it been enforcing ‘diversity’ hiring, most small to medium sized companies couldn’t care less. No, the biggest issue has been managers running off the reservation and doing stupid things, or refusing to do their jobs. My favorite example in this regard was a manager who demanded to only hire Mexicans because they were better performers. They weren’t, actually. This guy’s top performers were all of Indian desent, with the top half of his performers not showing any particular trend in ethnicity. However, Mexicans it turned out were less apt to question him, and treated him like a god on earth. So, should HR not have stepped in and told this idiot he had to hire for actual performance reasons? Should we have let him sink the company with potentially worse overall performance and also potential legal risks just to stroke his ego? Again, one story like this of a multitude, one of the other prominent ones involves an IT department manager who would only hire Romanians. To his credit his department at least functioned well, but it drove the costs of hiring up because we had to cycle through tons of qualified people before we found someone for him to interview who had the right ancestry.

    Or how about a company owner who refused to offer flexible schedules? Great one that, because a manager that was also a close personal friend of his offered it to his employees anyway. That department’s performance went way up, their absenteeism went way down, their retention was up, every single positive indicator was up. The owner finally admitted to the head of HR, who had been pushing for this policy, that he made a mistake. Plans were made to roll it out company wide, at the last minute the owner walked into a meeting and started screaming at people at the top of his lungs about how he wasn’t going to ‘give anything away’ to his employees just because he could. The plans were scrapped. There’s the overly managed and controlled market people deal with every day, a business own deliberately doing something to lower his company’s potential productivity because there are so many people desperate for jobs, why not? You can just throw away the burned out ones and replace them for the most part, it’s only in demand skills that require any ‘special’ attention, and by ‘special’ I mean not treating them like emulsified balls of ferrett crap.

    HR can seem like a fiefdom sometimes. We do have to exclude people and keep secretive to a degree. Unless of course, you want your personal information sprayed all over the office for everyone to see. We have to deal with everything from deaths in people’s families to people with diseases or conditions who want to work, and do so quite well, but might need an accomodation here or there, and might not want the entire office to know their business. All manner of personal business which people want kept confidential, for all kinds of reasons, which might affect the business and how we do things but which, generally speaking, not everyone has a right to know if we can keep it confidential. So we do. It’s a fiefdom because too many managers are apt to screw it up if they get involved.

    In all my years of experience, when managers wanted to do stupid things, it was HR who stood in their way. When managers and business owners were assured that working for them was a privilege and people should consider themselves lucky to be there, it was HR who stepped in and told them they still had to pay attention to compensation levels and work-life balance, and that those things mattered if they didn’t want to burn through their entire available candidate pool in less than a year, no matter how much of a ‘privilege’ it was to work there.

    Over the decades in the US every possible job-killing protectionist racket has been tried, and the currency has been continuously debased. Those policies concurrently destroy competing job opportunities and devalue wages, keeping labor’s share of the expanding pie always lagging those of firm’s owners and financiers. Go ask Sean Corrigan, he pointed out as much in one of his Mises talks a long time ago. While that’s happening, HR does deal with a bit of government BS and compliance. But our main role is, in my experience and ironically enough, to try and stop companies from destroying themselves from within with idiotic and destructive policies towards their labor simply because they think they can treat people like crap because labor has been at a near permanent disadvatage thanks to over a century of idiotic policies and currency manipulation. This is increasingly hard to do in an economy where many companies would prefer some form of indentured servitude on a managed market where their competition is strictly limited, rather than to compete for free labor on an actual free market, because they’ve never known anything else. They wouldn’t know a free market if it bit them on the ass and called them daddy. And HR, whether you like them or not, is usually the department standing between the employees and the employer, constantly reminding the latter that to treat the former with at least a modicum of respect is just good business sense. Not everyone is lucky like me, to work for a company where the employer actually seems to care about its employees. Most work for people who would happily throw their employees’ children into a woodchipper if it meant a .000000000000001% increase in quarterly profits.

    Maybe next time Tom Woods wants to talk about HR, he can talk to someone who actually works in… HR. I’d recommend Liz Ryan or Peter Capelli. Both are recognized in the field, I have no idea of their political or economic leanings though I get the feeling they’re both lefties. But they’ve at least worked and published in the field, which is a massive leg up on this guest. Lazlo Bock over at Google is another person worth talking with, or Dr. John Sullivan, who writes regularly for Ere Media. It’s not like there’s a shortage of people in the industry, God only knows why Woods decided to talk to some random guy who had a bad experience getting a mortgage once and decided to write a book. Having worked with many people who saw HR as some sort of obstacle, I can say unequivocally that sometimes they were right, but way more often than not HR was just the obstacle to them enacting their own stupidity at the expense of the company and people’s livelihoods. That’s an obstacle I’m happy to count myself among.

    • Recruiter –

      I hope you get time to actually read my book. In a short interview there’s not enough time for nuance or depth. I consulted many sources and quite a number of HR managers, but more importantly mid-level managers who only see HR staff when there’s trouble. And most of my sources are in engineering and technology, so the high quality of both employees and managers make HR less helpful and more culturally unlike the general staff. I did make a point of acknowledging the many hardworking HR people who put out the fires and work hard to promote the business.

      But since my book is a polemic – intended to be a corrective for the hundreds of other books cheerleading for current HR fads and elevating the importance of HR for an audience of HR specialists who of course want to promote their own specialty above others – it focuses on the negative and the worst excesses of HR staff less competent that you say you were.

      Every bureaucrat thinks they work hard to hold back the tides of chaos. You probably worked very hard, and of course you were called in when some manager had screwed up, so your dim view of managers generally is understandable. Your view that low and mid-level managers are accidents waiting to happen and only enlightened guidance from the likes of you kept them from disaster is just a tad skewed. What business is foolishly promoting people with no emotional intelligence, manners, or good business sense into management? What industry did you work in that had such incompetent and insensitive managers?

      One, performance evaluations and legal risk. First, the legal risk for employers viz a viz their employees is next to zero in the US. With the exception of California, if you ask an actual labor lawyer if you can or should sue for X, Y, or Z, they will almost unanimously tell you that you can’t…

      Most of my sources – and most of the technology industry, which was one of the focuses of the book – are in California, specifically Silicon Valley, and if you had actually read it you would have seen cases and excerpts from attorneys involved in litigation, defending against state regulators and class action attorneys suing under California’s antiquated labor laws specifying things like break times, proper seating, and temperature for workplaces long since evolved away from factories.

      It’s true that most lawsuits of alleged discriminatory firing don’t go far, but the threat is only manageable because companies have taken defensive action by staying aware of the possibility and starting a documentation trail of poor performance a year or more before the intended firing. Costly settlements still happen (quietly, of course) to avoid legal and reputational costs.

      In my entire career I’ve met three or four managers who actually had a clue what they were doing, and I’ve worked with hundreds at this point, maybe over a thousand; directly for a few and with many more as an HR and recruiting person.

      In the companies I’m familiar with, new managers get guidance from their own managers and those who don’t show some decent understanding of their role do not progress further. Since you are steeped in HR, you think “training” is the answer – like any quasi-government bureaucrat, you think a program and a certain number of hours in a classroom is needed to impart the common sense and emotional skills to manage diverse people to get a job done. And you resent that no one has given HR budget to set up training programs and pull skilled people away for days of nonproductive paid time to be enlightened by HR staff and their favorite contractors.

      My favorite example in this regard was a manager who demanded to only hire Mexicans because they were better performers. They weren’t, actually. This guy’s top performers were all of Indian descent, with the top half of his performers not showing any particular trend in ethnicity. However, Mexicans it turned out were less apt to question him, and treated him like a god on earth. So, should HR not have stepped in and told this idiot he had to hire for actual performance reasons?

      This manager should have been fired – and in any well-managed company with smart employees, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. The companies I know of would have had peer managers and upper managers detecting his incompetence and he would never have been put in a management role (or even employed.)

      …. Again, one story like this of a multitude, one of the other prominent ones involves an IT department manager who would only hire Romanians. To his credit his department at least functioned well, but it drove the costs of hiring up because we had to cycle through tons of qualified people before we found someone for him to interview who had the right ancestry.

      So you cooperated in his violation of the equal employment laws? Interesting.

      And HR, whether you like them or not, is usually the department standing between the employees and the employer, constantly reminding the latter that to treat the former with at least a modicum of respect is just good business sense. Not everyone is lucky like me, to work for a company where the employer actually seems to care about its employees. Most work for people who would happily throw their employees’ children into a woodchipper if it meant a .000000000000001% increase in quarterly profits.

      So you’re a free-market guy, but think company owners, CEOs, and managers are all incompetent, don’t realize a high-quality, happy workforce is a competitive advantage that can make the company succeed and grow, and only you and HR departments everywhere keep them from destroying their companies by turning them into grim, despotic labor camps?

      Well, first, companies that keep their HR departments from falling into that kind of condescending attitude by cultivating managers who are competent enough to rarely need your help – so HR is kept small and focused on helping managers – are better places to work and more productive.

      Maybe next time Tom Woods wants to talk about HR, he can talk to someone who actually works in… HR. Id recommend Liz Ryan or Peter Capelli. Both are recognized in the field, I have no idea of their political or economic leanings though I get the feeling they’re both lefties. But they’ve at least worked and published in the field, which is a massive leg up on this guest. Lazlo Bock over at Google is another person worth talking with, or Dr. John Sullivan, who writes regularly for Ere Media.

      You do realize that no one who is a careerist in the field would ever dare tell people that the Emperor of HR is naked. I think I quoted all of the people you mention somewhere in the book, and Bock in particular has done good work getting Google away from their academic, credentialist early employment prejudices to get really productive people. But none of them are going to look at HR with a critical eye and admit that most HR departments in many companies are doing as much harm as good, especially under the new atmosphere of political correctness (which I gather didn’t affect your work, but is an increasing problem in Silicon Valley.)

      I’ll leave you with some mainstream critiques made recently. I’d hope you would actually read my book and come away a little more respectful of what I’m trying to do.

      https://www.fastcompany.com/30…

      http://www.theatlantic.com/bus…

      http://fortune.com/2015/04/02/…

       

      • “And most of my sources are in engineering and technology, so the high quality of both employees and managers make HR less helpful and more culturally unlike the general staff. ”

        Do you have any actual evidence in your book as to the ‘high quality’ of these people? Do you have side by side comparisons showing them achieving better productivity and retention rates, or did you just take their word for it? Far be it from me to suggest you need to do more than talk to a few people in a couple narrow sectors who are mostly located in the most highly regulated state in the entire union that is notorious for its complex labor laws before you generalize to the entire profession.

        “In the companies I’m familiar with, new managers get guidance from their own managers and those who don’t show some decent understanding of their role do not progress further. Since you are steeped in HR, you think “training” is the answer – like any quasi-government bureaucrat, you think a program and a certain number of hours in a classroom is needed to impart the common sense and emotional skills to manage diverse people to get a job done. ”

        Your derisive attitude toward training is indicative of why your book is likely not worth reading. Again, far be it from me to suggest that simply assuming someone’s expertise in an area and not bothering to at least bolster them with some education on the matter might be a bad move. Once more, do you cite any actual evidence for the quality of the ‘guidance’ these people get, or do they instinctively know how to manage? Do they know how to break a job down into deliverables, time frames, and quality metrics, or might they need some… GASP! … training on how to do so? Do they think people can work endlessly and tend to overwork people until they burnout, or do they realize people have a breaking point and need rest? Based on what I’ve heard from silicon valley, I can guess which it is. Do any of them bother to do salary surveys before they move to hire people to ensure they’re not under or over offering? The latter being far less frequent, but it does happen. Do any of them know how to actually develop and write an actual job description so the people they’re looking to hire have a clue what they’re in for, or do they all do the typical thing of writing a description of the person they think can do the job they think they want to hire for, and then ambush them with reality after they’re hired? Do any of them have any training in any type of interviewing technique, be it behavioral or performance based, and what’s their success rate relative to what can be expected with industry best practices? Comparisons like that would be actual evidence.

        “This manager should have been fired – and in any well-managed company with smart employees, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. The companies I know of would have had peer managers and upper managers detecting his incompetence and he would never have been put in a management role (or even employed.)”

        Which goes to show your naivety and lack of experience in the field. Why would this manager be fired by the very people who promoted him when doing so would be a negative reflection on their own judgement? Yes, in some idealized firm that only exists as a proposed hypothetical in the mind of an academic who has never actually worked for a living, this manager would have been fired, or at least disciplined. However, in the real world hiring, promotions, and terminations are not just informed by performance, but by politics both good and bad, competence and incompetence, nepotism, and fear. IO psychologists have studied these dynamics for a long time, nepotism is a big one, especially in family owned companies, and I can assure you that the son of the boss has, quite often, damaged his father’s company with no consequences simply because of his relationship. And it’s HR more often than not that has to put a leash on that crap and who even occasionally does something horrible like suggest they hire out of the box people, and not fire people for spurious reasons irrelevant to performance.

        “So you cooperated in his violation of the equal employment laws? Interesting.”

        I guess passively yes, I just kept putting qualified people in front of him, letting his managers know about the problem, and they didn’t do anything about it because his department’s performance was okay. Eventually someone with the right background came in front of him and he hired that person, the business was in NYC and there were enough ethnic enclaves still there that eventually a Romanian came our way. What did happen, after I left that company, was that one Asian kid was transferred from the development side of IT to networking to help cover some turnover, and in short order he quit and in his exit interview apparently lambasted the manager and department. He was harassed to hell and back for various reasons including his race and demeanor, which was reserved.

        Now, here’s the problem and why ‘diversity’ might be a laudable goal to educate these guys on, because what happens when they can’t find any more Romanians? Do they just deal with massive turnover because these guys don’t know how to treat people who aren’t of their ilk? Work perpetual overtime? Import someone directly from Romania? The company can’t fire the whole damn department and lose all that training and institutional knowledge. Gee, might some… GASP!… training on how not to be a dick potentially be in order to mitigate the situation, or even solve it?

        I knew those guys, I don’t think they were deliberately being schmucks, they just all came from a very gruff, very blunt, very low emotional intelligence background. Christ, have you ever yourself worked with a ton of eastern European immigrants? Gone to a Russian restaurant and dealt with the waiters? If someone had addressed that as an issue before the managers built their own internal ethnic kingdom within the company it wouldn’t have been a problem. But no one cared until I and the HR manager at the time pointed out the problem repeatedly. To my knowledge it’s still on going though, because the department ain’t broken in terms of performance, not yet. But they are setting themselves up for a potentially massive point of failure that could be avoided if they’d force these guys to think outside their own nationality. But, wouldn’t want to let a liberal idea like diversity hurt their performance. Don’t want to hobble the managers with pesky HR requirements like not setting up a department with an obvious and glaring vulnerability, the legal risks and ramifications of which pale in comparison to the largely unseen costs, current and potential, that they’re imposing on themselves.

        “So you’re a free-market guy, but think company owners, CEOs, and managers are all incompetent, don’t realize a high-quality, happy workforce is a competitive advantage that can make the company succeed and grow, and only you and HR departments everywhere keep them from destroying their companies by turning them into grim, despotic labor camps?”

        I grade competence based on evidence, company owners and CEOs may or may not be incompetent, since we don’t operate in a free market it’s hard to nail down how much of their success is due to skill vs political acumen. However, I do not see anything in particular that assures they have any expertise in human capital management. If there was and they did, they wouldn’t fail so often on that front. Check out the reviews on Glassdoor.com of many companies, or Indeed.com. Look at their actual turnover data if you can get hold of it.

        The vast majority of businesses in this country are not silicon valley firms, large or small, worrying endlessly about diversity hires. They are small to medium sized businesses owned and run by people who have no particular qualifications in human capital management. They had a good idea for a business or a product or service and got it off the ground, that’s it. That is not evidence they have any particular skill in hiring, retaining, or managing people.

        “You do realize that no one who is a careerist in the field would ever dare tell people that the Emperor of HR is naked.”

        I have, which is why I do it anonymously. You’re not entirely wrong in your concerns, but the idea that the majority of HR people nationwide are obsessing over diversity hires and government compliance is nonsense. The vast majority of HR departments at the vast majority of companies consist of the payroll guy or girl, who handles the payroll, occasional employee complaints, and a labor lawyer who they talk to when things get serious. And where HR departments do exist in larger companies, the vast majority of people I have met and worked with are doing their best day after day to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot with their own stupidity. And the source of most of the worst behaviors is managers, and not blatant screw ups like the example I initially gave, but just people who have been promoted to their level of incompetence and are barely holding on without a clue what they’re doing, and their employers not offering any resources to help them figure it out, more often than not.

        When compliance with regulations does come up, it’s dealt with as a risk vs cost issue like anything else. One manufacturer I worked for knew of and deliberately ignored many labor regulations. They had people who should have been hourly classified as exempt so they could avoid overtime, they routinely ‘adjusted’ the punches of hourly people to avoid overtime as well. Could these people complain to the DOL? Sure. The DOL doesn’t usually do jack shit to help anyone. In my entire career I’ve seen one company successfully sued for back wages out of God know how many that were in blatant violation of the laws. One. It’s also worth noting that as free market people, however we feel about those laws, those employers did agree to abide by them when they hired their employees, so their employees are not entirely wrong or out of line to get pissed when it happens, or to try and seek redress via the only route that is practically available to them. Telling them to just get another job is an assinine response in a market where jobs are increasingly scarce, and not everyone can be a podcaster.

        Maybe I’ll read the book, but if all you really did was talk to a bunch of people in silicon valley it’s a waste of my time. I can’t believe I have to explain to a bunch of Austrian econ inclined folks that there’s a difference between what people say and what they demonstrate via their actions. Simply assuming managers are right in what they want to do is insane. Hell, in my second to last job I was recruiting for tech firms in NYC and almost every single ‘manager’ I worked with had no idea that the salaries they were offering were 50% or more below market for the positions they were looking to fill, because they hadn’t bothered to check. But hey, I’m sure they had ‘guidance’ from their managers, so they shouldn’t need actual data to rely on or anything. It’s perfectly reasonable to try and hire a C# developer with ten years of experience in NYC for 50K. Gotta trust the instincts of those managers, they know so much more than those pesky HR people who bother to look at actual data and might want them to occasionally hire someone who isn’t a carbon copy of themselves.

        Jeb Kinnison

        • Fools and knaves lurk everywhere, I suppose, but your experiences don’t match what most of my sources say about companies today. Otherwise why would Deloitte be suggesting an end to annual performance reviews, to be replaced by more-constant manager feedback and a reliance on direct managers, with some coaching from “concierge” consultants, to determine raise and promotions? Their studies point to management-by-HR as a source of one-size-fits-all schemes that managers have to game anyway. It’s true that less well-managed companies end up with bad low- and mid-level managers, with your style of HR serving as a bandaid to prevent disaster. But I can’t help noticing how close your position is to the usual defender of progressive government, who believes that average citizen is too stupid and unenlightened to decide any important matter for themselves. An enlightened class of trained bureaucrats can regulate them into being better citizens…

          Your comments are valuable as one view from a long career, but most big employers today have big HR depts. doing things like requiring regular diversity and sexual harassment training by timed web browser, forcing productive and already-completely-aware people to jump through the same hoops over and over again, a degrading and timewasting experience for the 95% who don’t need it and provably useless on the 5% who do.

          I do hope you read the book, where I suspect you will agree with a lot of it. Just like staffers of a government bureaucracy, you see all the good work you appear to do but can’t see how things might be done differently, so you feel attacked and are outraged. No one is saying your work was pointless or that all HR is useless or unneeded. This book is supposed to counter the vast quantities of pro-HR, pro-Progressive propaganda put out by the HR industry. The revolution is coming…

           


The book is currently available in: trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookselling web sites; Kindle ebook format from Amazon exclusively; and as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.


More reading:

A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work

The Tom Woods Show, Episode 817: “Death by HR”

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations]

The Tom Woods podcast on Death by HR is here, and on Youtube here. We ran overtime a bit, but aside from editing out some lapses and timechecks, they ran almost all of our discussion.

I invented a new term, “reverse regulatory capture,” to describe how HR culture has generally come to accept the attitudes of the progressive regulators and labor lawyers toward much of their work. One of my editors told me when I used “Stockholm Syndrome” to describe the phenomenon that many readers would not understand what that term meant — here’s an explanation. Often used when talking about Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 who adopted the revolutionary name Tania and participated in bank robberies with them. Responding to someone who holds power over you by first pretending to adopt their values to avoid punishments, and eventually coming to truly believe them. HR has complied with government enforcement so long that its thinkers and educational programs have adopted the progressive values of the regulators.

I took his introductory comments as a blurb for the book:

“Interesting, cutting, incisive book about what’s really going on in HR departments in companies across the country.” — Tom Woods, senior fellow of the Mises Institute and host of The Tom Woods Show


The book is currently available in: trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookselling web sites; Kindle ebook format from Amazon exclusively; and as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.


More reading:

A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work

Death by HR: Audio Introduction

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,]

The Tom Woods podcast will be doing a segment on Death by HR tomorrow, and when they send me the link I’ll put it up here so my readers can listen. I wasn’t familiar with his extensive writings or his career, but it’s impressive as seen in his Wikipedia entry. His current web site is here, and his podcast show is popular — old episodes are here. He’s closely associated with Peter Schiff and has him on frequently as a guest, and he recently started the Contra Krugman podcast — which uses the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s partisan writings on economics and current affairs as a foil to discuss more realistic economic ideas.

I enjoyed our discussion and was gratified that he supports the book. I did a practice segment a few days ago that turned out well enough that I’m posting it as a good short introduction to me as the author and the ideas in the book. Tom’s interview segment will be 15 minutes or so, and directed to a few areas of interest, so the focus is different — there’s not too much overlap.

So enjoy and pass on the audio of Jeb Kinnison introducing “Death by HR.”


The book is currently available in: trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookselling web sites; Kindle ebook format from Amazon exclusively; and as an audiobook from Audible and Amazon.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.


More reading:

A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work

Death by HR Introduction: HR Pushes Damaging Regulations Into the Enterprise

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[The Introduction from Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now for Kindle and in trade paperback.]

Introduction

This book is about the new Age of Incompetence, with brain-dead, unaccountable employees holding sinecures at the heart of our government agencies and regulated institutions like banks and hospitals, protected by affirmative action and union policies. The rot is spreading as pressure from state and federal regulation of companies has increased, empowering an internal compliance bureaucracy — Human Resources (HR) — that has devalued the best job candidates and employees and promoted affirmative action and diversity over team productivity.

The result has been ever-more-costly failures and a steep decline in organizational performance. From the mortgage meltdown that brought down the world’s economy in 2008, to the disastrous launch of the healthcare.gov website for Obamacare, major segments of business and government in the US have grown more expensive and less competent over the past few decades. Billions of dollars of waste in government contracts for IT projects, boondoggle weapons systems, and deadly service failures at the VA are in the news every day. Public schools are widely seen as mediocre, and in the poorest urban districts they are failing to provide a decent education for the students who need good schools the most to make up for bad family backgrounds. Costs for regulated services like schools, colleges, medical insurance, drugs, courts, prisons, and infrastructure like roads and bridges rise far faster than inflation, while time to complete major projects stretches out to decades, and many fail completely and are cancelled after billions have been spent. And the rot is spreading as government pushes businesses to adopt similar employment policies, with HR enforcing government mandates that compromise competitiveness and give overseas companies the advantage.

This book will trace the factors that have hobbled growth and damaged organizational competence. Government regulation has led to HR departments that actively sabotage the hiring of the best candidates for jobs, with by-the-book mediocrities placed in positions of responsibility.

Silicon Valley and the tech industries are the next targets. If you’re a manager at a tech company, I’ll suggest some ways to protect your people from HR and its emphasis on credentials and affirmative action (AA) over the best fit for a position. Corporate leaders need to be sure their HR departments are managed to prevent infiltration by staff more interested in correct politics than winning products. And I’ll show why appeasement of diversity activists is a dangerous strategy that may make your organization a target for further extortionate demands….

Affirmative action policies have placed mediocrities at major decision points in most large companies, government agencies, and highly-regulated institutions like schools and hospitals. A small percentage of deadwood can be routed around, but over time feedback effects from the generalized lack of accountability and lowered standards for performance cripple the institution. This is the cause of the failure and extreme cost overruns of almost all large government projects and a tolerance for incompetence so long as policy manuals are followed to the letter. This effect is largest in government and public education, but also visible in larger companies where HR departments are coming to be staffed by progressives who believe in removing non-progressive thoughts and people from the workplace. In high tech, women and minorities dominate HR in part because companies wanted to balance their male-and-Asian-heavy engineering staff to make their numbers look better, but now are just realizing they’ve created an internal enemy to product quality and excellence in staffing engineering teams. (A corporate manager comments: “How do you know HR is lying? Their lips are moving…”)

This book will focus on the situation in the US, which was until recently more resistant to the bureaucratic disease and thus had a healthier economy and a more dynamic labor market than Europe. The onset of top-down sclerosis by Federal regulation and micromanagement has reduced US growth to the same stagnant levels seen in Europe, for much the same reason: educated by public schools to believe they need permission to do anything, young people stop trying to do anything, and wait for someone to help them. The increasing numbers of untouchable diversity hires in positions of responsibility has inhibited accountability, and the inability to fire employees after even the most egregious malfeasance has spread from civil service and union shops into major corporations —s ince some cannot be held accountable for incompetence, no one is; and the continuing presence of employees who coworkers know are shirkers, incompetents, or even criminals reduces the morale of those who are good at their jobs and work hard. The dysfunction varies by industry and company, with the worst-hit in heavily-regulated sectors like banking, education, and healthcare, where government either controls every element of the business or pays for most of the product. Sectors which until recently were relatively free of deadwood, like high tech, are now under attack by the diversity activists, who want more hiring of less qualified people to make high tech workforces more representative — which would mean discriminating against better candidates who are white, Asian, Indian, male, etc.

This book will also look at a few other countries that have tried various forms of affirmative action policies to demonstrate that while these places are culturally very different, the divisive and socially damaging long-term effects of AA preferences are visible in every country where it has been in place for longer than one generation.

Affirmative action — which substitutes the lower standard of “good enough” for “best” in hiring new employees, setting the bar low enough so that affirmative action hires can meet it instead of seeking out the most qualified candidate — is not the only labor regulation crippling organizational productivity. State and federal regulation and micromanagement of economic activity continues to increase, complicating and delaying every public and many private projects. Whole sectors of the economy are weighed down by regulation; new medical devices and drugs cost $billions to get through corrupt and scientifically-antiquated FDA studies and approvals processes, which results in high prices for new medical technology. Routine services like dental cleanings and hair braiding are illegal in many states unless done under supervision of a cartel of state-certified practitioners; four states even outlaw residential decorating services unless licensed. Hazards of toppling armoires aside, the state is easily captured by motivated business groups to outlaw new competition for their business, and under the pretense of protecting consumers, allowing professional cartels to charge much more for services.

Labor laws are similarly gamed by politically-influential unions and power-seeking bureaucrats. Minimum wage laws outlaw lower wages for unproven or new workers, and restrictions on firing as in Europe make it less likely companies will take a chance on hiring a full-time worker rather than a temp or contractor. The long-term result of Euro-style labor protection is Euro-style high unemployment, especially in young, inexperienced workers, who are thereby kept from ever gaining the experience that would make them valuable enough to hire despite the additional rules and costs imposed by the laws. People accept that education costs money and that students may be paid less for internships or even pay outright for classes, but forget that most occupational skills are acquired in the workplace, in the first years of employment. By outlawing lower wages and at-will employment, labor laws are keeping young people from important learning experiences and ruining their chance to start on a career ladder.

Until the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal, the Supreme Court had held back many attempts to regulate private business, ruling them unconstitutional overreaches. But after Roosevelt threatened to pack the court with new justices who would approve his regulatory agenda, the Supreme Court bowed to his wishes. In a series of cases, the newly Progressive-leaning Court expanded the Commerce Clause to allow federal regulation of almost all economic activity. In Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), the court ruled that a farmer could be fined for growing wheat on his own land for his own animals’ consumption because he would otherwise have had to purchase wheat in the market, which a 1938 agricultural control law regulated. After this, the court rarely found any Federal regulation of contracts or commerce to be unconstitutional, despite the clear intent of the framers that such Federal power over commerce was intended to prevent states from creating trade barriers and discriminating against the products of other US states.

As a result, laws and regulations on commerce of all kinds — and labor specifically — have expanded, and the staffing levels of Human Resources departments and administrations at colleges and hospitals have ballooned to meet bureaucratic requirements. Federal fingers are now in every pie, wasting resources and deadening initiative, since a lawsuit or negative attention from the NLRB, EEOC, Dept. of Education, HHS, EPA, and other enforcement agencies can destroy or damage a company or institution. HR and administrative staff approve of the progressive control agenda—which gives them power and status—and when free to drift leftward serve as an internal fifth column dedicated to enforcing progressive standards on their own organization and its workforce.

Companies serving an international market find themselves battling foreign companies who don’t have as many burdens, especially in Asia. The US advantage of a productive workforce and innovative technology is gradually worn down by the time and money spent fighting bureaucrats. Mediocre managements take current rewards for themselves but ignore the future, eventually failing. Foreign companies take over markets, one by one, as US companies dragged down by unions and mediocre key employees lose revenues and eventually abandon markets.

Governments have expanded the areas they control while the Civil Service, union, and affirmative action rules imposed on their workforces have reduced their effectiveness in their most critical functions. From deaths caused by bureaucratic malfeasance at the VA to killer cops rarely punished and kept on the payroll by the efforts of police unions, this lack of accountability makes it difficult to remove incompetent or criminal public employees and makes it impossible for even motivated elected officials to reform public services. The rising debt and costs for every public project mean failing services, rampant injustice, and decaying infrastructure are not being addressed. As a result, US competitiveness is declining vs. countries with better-managed public services. And public anger and cynicism as the years pass and each new group of elected officials fails to fix any of the problems they promised to fix is leading to a dangerous disregard for the law and a desire for a dictator who will sweep aside the checks and balances of a Republic.

Because there are so many examples of malfeasance and incompetence in government’s control of commerce and labor regulations, I was forced to leave most of that material for the next book, which will focus on government. Entire books have been written about the costly failures of the Drug War, public schools, affirmative action, and police militarization. This book will focus on the creeping spread of this atmosphere of consequence-free failure. The hubris of central planners and their capture by special interests, acting in concert with well-meaning but naive do-gooders who think they can vote their way to a better world, has brought us the diseases of socialism by taking away authority and accountability that let businesses succeed or fail. The pleasant-sounding ideal of equality of outcome — which killed hundreds of millions of people as the activating principle of Marxism-Communism — is actually the enemy of individual freedom, accountability, and achievement. The decline of excellence as a primary goal leading to profit and growth has not come because people like failure and mediocrity, but because they were sold a fairy tale about how government could make everything fairer and make everyone happy through the workings of laws and regulations. The result has been a lot more unhappiness and civil strife as the unintended consequences have swamped whatever good was intended. And the level of hypocrisy has risen as politicians promote the message that everyone is a victim and that someone else — “the 1%,” corporations, Republicans, foreigners, Muslims, blacks, the Koch Brothers, the Jews, whoever works as a scapegoat—is responsible for keeping them down.

High tech, one sector where the US led the world and generated immense new wealth, has now been targeted as the next area to be regulated. Activists and demagogues are attracted by money, and with more than half of the US private economy now controlled by government regulators, it was inevitable the parasites would look toward the remaining healthy sectors for their next fix. Calls for diversity quotas in tech company workforces, video game characters, and open-source software projects are early warning signs. HR departments in most tech companies serve as the political commissars of regulation, and HR departments in tech are staffed by lower-paid employees who have little understanding of the technology but a lot of interest in screening out even the best prospective employees who don’t fit the narrow diversity mold. Managers who want the best teams and the fastest, coolest products are resisting these HR apparatchiks, and I’ll show what you can do about it if you work in tech.

The next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring — which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. Seattle has already passed an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies — next what counts as qualified will come under their control, and government-sponsored Section 8 and protected class tenants will be deemed qualified no matter what their credit reports and criminal records show. And similar movements in hiring — supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ — are coming soon.

There are many people working hard in HR to promote the interests of their organization, but their efforts are often blunted by the prevailing HR culture that substitutes buzzwords and feel-good social goals for promotion of productivity and excellence:

…Most HR organizations have ghettoized themselves literally to the brink of obsolescence. They are competent at the administrivia of pay, benefits, and retirement, but companies increasingly are farming those functions out to contractors who can handle such routine tasks at lower expense. What’s left is the more important strategic role of raising the reputational and intellectual capital of the company — but HR is, it turns out, uniquely unsuited for that. Here’s why:

HR people aren’t the sharpest tacks in the box. We’ll be blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding career in business, your first instinct is not to join the human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation’s top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school: “The best and the brightest don’t go into HR.”

Who does? Intelligent people, sometimes—but not businesspeople. “HR doesn’t tend to hire a lot of independent thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses,” says Garold L. Markle, a longtime human-resources executive at Exxon and Shell Offshore who now runs his own consultancy. Some are exiles from the corporate mainstream: They’ve fared poorly in meatier roles—but not poorly enough to be fired. For them, and for their employers, HR represents a relatively low-risk parking spot.

Others enter the field by choice and with the best of intentions, but for the wrong reasons. They like working with people, and they want to be helpful—noble motives that thoroughly tick off some HR thinkers. “When people have come to me and said, ‘I want to work with people,’ I say, ‘Good, go be a social worker,'” says Arnold Kanarick, who has headed human resources at the Limited and, until recently, at Bear Stearns. “HR isn’t about being a do-gooder. It’s about how do you get the best and brightest people and raise the value of the firm.”[1]


[1] “Why We Hate HR: In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing, and developing that talent should be one of the most important tasks in a corporation. So why does human resources do such a bad job—and how can we fix it?” Fast Company, August 1, 2005. http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr


Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.


More reading:

A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work