Human Resources?

Led by commerce, personnel departments have generally been re-named as 'Human Resources'.  This change has been far-reaching indeed; the term personnel has all but disappeared, and the new designation is ubiquitous indeed.  Even in the Church of England (I say 'even' but it's hardly surprising), HR departments have sprung up everywhere.

It strikes me that this redesignation is a real retrograde step; or it is as far as 'persons' are concerned.  I imagine the term HR is a form of accountant-speak in which everything is reduced to a matter of pounds and pence.  The problem with the term is that it is, in a sense, de-humanising.  It implicitly (explicitly?) reduces persons (with all that the term implies in terms of inalienable rights and the like),  to mere 'resources'.  Human-beings, in this new milieu, are effectively reduced to merely instrumental value, like the photocopier or the fax machine.  As resources, they can be called upon, deployed, exploited (even in the best sense) in the furtherance of an end beyond themselves and in which they may have no share.  A resource is something essentially inert, and of no value until it is utilised.

The word 'personnel', by contrast, explicitly reminds those in positions of authority, that they are dealing with persons and not mere resources.  Persons have views, opinions and values.  Their very presence and status as persons serves as a reminder that the true value of any work or human enterprise derives from the value of those for whom that work is undertaken, an insight articulated memorably by Pope Paul VI in a homily on the feast of the Holy Family way back in 1964.

Persons, then, have  an intrinsic value.  Indeed, they are the end to which all human endeavour is oriented.  Resources have an instrumental, or relative, value.  Those who would wish to suggest that, over the past thirty years, most people's working lives have worsened in so many ways, might well argue that the change from 'personnel' to 'human resources' has the character of an uncorrected Freudian slip.