Business Orwellianism: Human resources

Let's face it, for about 99 percent of businesses in America big enough to have a human resources department, these companies do not care about finding and developing the talent within their employees as a resource of the humans they employ, let alone extending the idea of "talent" beyond skills to emotional and psychological expertise the development of which will be more beneficial to the employee, and thus make her or him more beneficial to the company, but also more "beneficial" to herself or himself as a human being.

Oh, sure, some higher-end corporations look more and more to assess these psychological and emotional talents, but in almost all cases, it's still for a business-exploitative utilitarian angle. And don't get me started on the even more neoliberal phrase of "human capital."

And, frankly, I'm sure this is why most big business CEOs oppose basic income or universal income or guaranteed income ideas. ‡

That said, back to the non-parenthesezed start to that last paragraph.

Small businesses at times have more incentive to develop the employee as a whole person because if you don't, it affects a large chunk of small-office interpersonal dynamics, and if those dynamics were at least OK before, then you're on the spot. That's of course praising with faint damns, which is another issue itself.

But big business doesn't even have this incentive. And resume-scanning programs that are far from AI, which itself can't search for emotional intelligence, can't cut the mustard.

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‡ I may delve deeper into the woods on any nuanced differences between those three phrases, plus issues about libertarian-driven versions of such ideas, in future blog posts, especially that latter. There's a lot of techies that support some version of this, and many are, IMO, likely somewhere between tech-neoliberals and libertarians.