One of the great benefits of working in think tank world is that you can have genuinely robust conversations in the office. From euthanasia to the price of a pint, there are few topics I haven’t debated at some point with a colleague sat opposite me.
While enjoyable, I understand that not all working environments can be like this. Most people, quite rightly, do not go to work with the expectation and indeed hope of some verbal sparring over the major issues of the day. They would rather get on with their job in relative peace until it hits 6pm and they can go home to the loving embrace of their partner.
Curating this safe professional environment requires rules – rules set by the bogeymen of many a drunken CEO, a human resources (HR) team. Understandable. No one should have to go to the office with the lingering fear that they may be harassed, molested or abused by a colleague. But when does a healthy appreciation for workplace boundaries become a toxic – to use an HR buzzword – obsession with power?
According to a new paper, the line is a blurred one. The study, conducted by The Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab, found that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) materials really screw people up. DEI, by the way, is the credo regularly preached by HR professionals which argues that racial majorities must be re-educated to a point where they no longer hold a ‘subconscious bias’ against minorities.
The main takeaway from their research is that a lot of DEI rhetoric caused test subjects to not only perceive prejudice where it didn’t exist, but also to become more authoritarian in their outlook. So authoritarian were some participants that a decent chunk of them started to agree with adapted Hitler quotes that replaced the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Brahmin’.
Troubling, yet fundamentally unsurprising findings. The critical theorists who come up with this stuff and their henchmen in HR argue that by virtue of your race, gender or sexuality, you are either inherently bigoted or inherently repressed and must have your thought manipulated accordingly.
It would be one thing if there weren’t that many people to enforce DEI training in workplaces, but the HR industry in Britain is booming. This isn’t just bad for inter-employee badinage, it’s also terrible for economic growth.
As Civic Future’s Pamela Dow wrote in an excellent article this week, the UK has one of the largest HR sectors in the world, second only to the Dutch. As Dow points out, there has been no correlation between the explosion in the number of HR professionals and an increase in the happiness and efficiency of employees. In fact, as the number of roles has increased, so have the number of tribunals and days lost to work-related illness. All the while, productivity has stagnated.
Drawing on her time in the Cabinet Office, Dow recommends that its top minister, Pat McFadden, slash the size of the ‘Government People Group’ (the body responsible for Civil Service HR) to unclog and speed up government business. Sadly, this ain’t going to happen and it isn’t just the public sector that will suffer as a result.
It’s not because it’s a bad idea that it won’t happen – it’s a very good one. The problem is that for all their pro-growth rhetoric, Labour aren’t interested in clever plans to raise productivity. In the private sector, as well as the public sector, Labour are actively fostering a landscape where firms are so bogged down by rules and processes that it is almost impossible for them to grow.
Take their Employment Rights Bill. The Government’s own analysis states that the measures it will impose on businesses will saddle them with £5 billion in extra costs. Employers will also be forced to accept a number of new guarantees for their workforce. One such example is the default right to be able to work from home. The costs of accommodating such arrangements are not insubstantial, but many employers would sooner accept these requests than cause a fuss with their workers. A predictable outcome given how trigger happy many employment tribunals are these days.
These regulations, much like the DEI malarkey, might sound well-intentioned. Talk of redistribution and fairness abounds, but there’s a tyranny in kindness. The debates around DEI and employment rights have been framed in such a way that to point out the vast costs they entail is to be either anti-worker or prejudiced. As such, most people are too afraid to.
Labour know this. But they can only rely on silent complicity for so long. It will soon become clear that the Government’s plans for business will not in fact boost growth, but rather will weaponise legions of 22-year-old HR professionals whose job it is to enforce these burdensome regulations. Given the pace at which Keir Starmer’s regime is already unravelling, this process might not take very long.
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