I am NOT a Resource.

Every year we have a Survey at work to find out what the troops think, amongst other things, about our Lords and Masters in the top echelons of the organisation. Largely, I believe, this is for purely PR reasons but our Middle Management seem to take it seriously (or more likely have been told to take it seriously) so after almost every survey we sit in a room for a few hours and discuss the results. For at least the past 3-4 years the views from the shop floor about those apparently leading us to a brave new future have been universally bad – and when I say bad I mean pretty appalling. I don’t think that they particularly care about this – after all why should they – but it seems that someone has convinced them that they need to appear to care, hence the meeting to understand what we’re thinking. As usual we didn’t really get anywhere because Middle Management didn’t want to ask the hard questions (opening up the proverbial can of worms) and no one on the shop floor wanted to say what was on their minds as we all wanted to keep our jobs – no attributable comments? Yeah, right….

Anyway, I don’t normally Blog about work and I’m not going to start here – or at least I’m not going to continue (much) before I get to my point. So as not to descend into the expected bitch-fest our get-together was ‘facilitated’ by someone from our HR Department who asked all of the politically correct questions salted with a few examples from TV shows and comments about his children. But one thing he did say, pretty much as an aside, made me say something in return. He said that we all, everyone in the room including himself was a resource, not unlike the flipchart he was writing on. To which I responded (to the room rather than to him) at a volume only those closest to me could hear was that I wasn’t a resource I was a human being. It got a laugh from a few people near me and then the pointless meeting went on. Now I’ve had this kind of argument before with people – and again since our group meeting. People (and organisations) can see me as a resource, they can classify me as one and treat me like one but that doesn’t make me a resource. Oh, I understand why they do it. In many ways it’s more efficient (and that’s a whole other argument) not to treat us as individuals. From a top-down perspective, especially from a great height, we’re simply not individuals but are in effect worker ants doing their thing as directed from above. But down at the coal face we sure feel like individuals (or at least I do) and don’t like being treated or thought of as a resource, a number on a spreadsheet or anything else that dehumanises us.

Inevitably when I bring up this objection the first thing people say is that I’m overreacting, that it’s just a word, that I can be an individual on my own time and that the company pays my wages so I am actually a resource whether I like it or not. To which I respond that names are important and although they pay my wages that doesn’t mean that they’ve bought me and that they certainly don’t own me. Of course this idea is rather more fundamental than being called a resource by someone who, not surprisingly, works in Human Resources. It’s the idea that people and human related activities are commodities to be bought, sold and traded like any other thing in the marketplace. Such an idea is one of, if not THE, biggest problems (or mistakes) in the world today. The idea that people can be bought, be owned, and that relationships or any other human activity can be ‘traded in’ for ones with a better return is corrosive in the extreme. I might be persuaded, cajoled or even bullied into a course of action but (at least I believe) I don’t think I can be bought. OK, no one has actually valued me enough to try but still I hope that I ‘value’ myself highly enough that no one would be willing to even try to tempt me with hard cash. As far as I know I’m simply not for sale – at least I hope not. I’ll let you know if anyone has that kind of folding money available to try their luck. In the meantime I shall remain a human being, no matter what they call me.