Show me someone who can say 'Human Resources Development' without a trace of irony and I will show you someone who has no self, or any other, awareness.
Ever since business schools and, by implication, business graduates have existed, so have congenial sounding euphemisms for entirely uncongenial phenomena. 'Flexible compensation' is a nice way of saying salary cut with the elusive possibility of performance linked pay. 'Offsite meeting' connotes a stressful, sleepless weekend when the company pays for your booze and expects you to work 14-hour days to produce a half-logical, one-fourth-plausible business plan which incarnates the wild fantasies of the business head. And "Performance Appraisal" means a theatrical performance designed to humiliate the employee: not once, not even twice, but three times. First, the employee is asked to fill her own appraisal document, aka the confessional statement which shall be henceforth be used as accusations by various reviewers. Then, there's the annual walk of shame to the boss's enclosure which begins with crushing anxiety and ends in fatally perforated self-esteem. Finally, there's the increment letter, quantifying the despair in economic terms.
Crowning all these gems of HR doublespeak is the dreaded statement, "We are going to have to let you go".
I speak from experience. On two occasions in a corporate career which lasted from 1985 to 2012, I was at the receiving end of this blatantly hypocritical line. I was not asking to be relieved. I had a wife, two growing children (read exponentiating expenses) and a colossal mortgage to defray. And on both occasions, the job market was beginning to dry up as the economy slowed down. Thankfully, there was a (light) cushion of savings and a large community of well-wishers which allowed the family unit to trundle, only slightly bruised, through choppy waters until, not a moment too soon, the next assignment came my way.
People don't ask to be relieved. Nobody asks to be relieved. I have resigned from jobs, even in a huff once when I was young and single and India's economy was in the first flush of galloping growth, soon after the great unleashing of animal spirits by M/s. Rao and Singh. I had a fundamental disagreement with my boss. Walked to my desk, picked up a memo pad, slipped in a carbon paper or two, and proceeded to write a terse but unambiguous letter of resignation. I wasn't asking to be let go. I was telling him I was done, finished, gone. There have been other resignations too; most have been elaborately constructed announcements of a forking of paths and a record of acknowledgements and gratitude. But none, not one, has ever been along the lines of "Chhodo mujhe, please chhod do, janey do mujhe, bhool jao ki mera tumhara kabhi koi rishta tha".
What, then, is this 'letting go' about? Gaslighting.
There. I said it. HR speak is all about gaslighting. Here's what a self-help website says about gaslighting.
"Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that occurs in abusive relationships. It is an insidious and sometimes covert type of emotional abuse where the bully or abuser makes the target question their judgments and reality.1 Ultimately, the victim of gaslighting starts to wonder if they are losing their sanity".
I entered the corporate world as a management trainee in 1985. Back in those days, employment conveyed a sense of lien: on a salary and some perquisites, on a career path which would involve many promotions and fancier designations, on stability of employment which would be conducive to taking and discharging long-term debt for buying expensive things like homes and cars. That first employer, Procter & Gamble Company, prided itself on offering lifetime employment and the claim held up to scrutiny. People really did join the company as rookies and retire, four or more decades later, having never even contemplated alternative employment.
Employment today is no more than visibility of the next pay cheque or three. En route, however, is incessant corporate gaslighting. To ensure that the employee progressively loses her moorings on not just the outside world but even her own inner universe of ambitions, aspirations and dreams.
Employment, in 2021 and the disconcertingly bleak immediate future is a demolition of the employee's epistemological sense; a blurring to grey of the difference between what is indisputably verifiable and what is merely assertion.
Look what it finally delivers. An ex-employee who exits the door carrying the entire blame and shame for the untimely end of her job. Who struggles with guilt for the merely harbouring the thought that the employer was the real cause of the severance. Whose epistemology is broken.
Am I glad I left it all behind!
