Jeff Bezos Says Amazon Won’t Tolerate ‘Callous’ Management Practices

I will keep buying from clothes from Primark because they provide the cheapest. Simple as that.

...

By establishing that they have policies against sexual harassment, discrimination, etc. etc. the company can say that there's no "systemic problem", and any particular incidents therefore must be the fault of the individual employees concerned and not the company itself.

They need HR to exist in so far as it allows them to tell this story to a judge if it ever does turn into a lawsuit.

It's simply not worth approaching HR. Talk to a lawyer before you talk to HR. You would only want to talk to HR if you were willing to sue your employer, which itself is only worthwhile doing if the amount of money you could win is sufficient that you won't need to work again (because in any public case, other employers are also going to avoid employing someone who has a history of suing their employer... as much as they legally can).

For anything more trivial than that, the best defense against an abusive employer is to be employable elsewhere. If you are willing and able to walk away and into another job, you'll be treated much better, regardless of any specific HR policies.

P.S. it made me laugh to see that the book hyper link is to amazon.com - how's that for irony!

Honestly, I haven't met one decent guy in HR in a loooong time. Quite the contrary, I have plenty of bad experiences with HR that made me believe those things. I'll give you my favorite examples:

I once got fired because I told some bitch (she was really a bitch, and that's not just my opinion, the whole workplace thought of that) to mind her own business. I was on a break and reading a magazine when she came in and started lecturing me on to "why I'm not doing other stuff? why do I read those kinds of magazines? (It was a gossip magazine, but who cares it was what it was nearby) I'm a little old for that." Politely but firmly told her something like "This is my break. Fuck off, you can't tell me what to do on my break and I read whatever I want to". She left. Three months later got called to get fired, turns out she was secretly raising reports about me that were small stuff (and completely fake) like "... was asked to do X and refused", "... yelled at a client", "... reads magazines while at work (of course)". When I had like 10 or so of them she fired me because of a "bad overall attitude" and those were her (fake) proofs. That's the kind of shit HR LOVES to do man.

Another one. I once knew (but not as in "a friend told me", I saw it) of a place where all the candidates that got hired were because they were laying down with the girl that ran the interviews. Later when they got the job, they started to get fired when that girl found them not sexually appealing anymore. Yup.

I think there has to be something psychological behind that, because other while other teammates may be assholes your job does not depend direclty on them or you are pretty much at the same level. Since HR is above you and can fire you at will there is a lot of power bestowed to only one side of the parts involved. I think it may be some kind of Stanford Prison stuff right there. Sorry to call it mate but your field is a rotten one.

Well it's because the people who are Amazon customers can relate these white collars being "harassed" at Amazon. It's because of a lot of these customers might have lived the same situation and know how horrible this is.