resources

So today I got an e-mail at the office; it was a request for workers for an assignment from the management level. The weird thing was that all of the references to people were exchanged with the word "resource." Which makes me think that the management doesn't think of workers as humans, but resources that have to be allocated and used.

Put in a broader context, this gets really interesting. In America, corporations are referred to as "human beings" on a legal level, and human beings are referred to as "resources" on a corporate level.

This attitude is directly linked to the American cheap labor conservative/corporatist ideologies. When you think of human beings only as another resource that has to be cultivated, you simply cannot have respect for them on a personal level. They're as useful to you as a pair of scissors, or a board of wood, or any range of time, be it a week, or a month, or a year.

Resourse, as defined by Answers.com:

- Something that can be used for support or help: The local library is a valuable resource.
- An available supply that can be drawn on when needed. Often used in the plural.

When you think of an employee as a resource instead of a human being, it becomes that much easier to lay one off and send their job to India or the sweat shops overseas. When you think of employees as resources, you make judgements about him or her based another much more liquid resource: money. While I'm not saying that a manager should just hire a bunch of employees and never consider the cost of their hiring, it goes without saying that it turns into a situation where you view employees only as a set of skills that can and should be purchased at the lowest market value, regardless of any other factor.

Employees are not simply sets of skills, and they're not resources.

This mindset probably isn't a problem for the direct management for any given employee. My boss above me and his boss are a part of my working life every single day. But when you start getting higher in hierarchy, where management doesn't even see many of its employees, doesn't know any of its employees, and wouldn't even know half of its employees if it saw them, you start getting into the "employees as resource" mindset. The closer the management gets to the stockholders and the further it gets from the day to day workers, they're suddenly forced to make decisions that are going to call for the cutting and culling of resources.

And so management will arrange meetings; and with pie charts, flow charts, line graphs, lists of expenses in any number of arrangements, and they will make decisions. They will purchase stationary resources from a different, cheaper company. They will purchase software resources from another, cheaper software vendor. And they will purchase their skill-set resources overseas in a different, cheaper country.

Next time you hear about a company closing down a factory or two, just remember, they're not thinking about the laying-off of human beings. They're just reallocating their resources.