HR Won’t Help You Here
You want to know how to file a complaint,
you want to know the process and the quaint
form you fill out in the system online.
You want to know the policy and the line
you call for information about your rights,
you want to know who manages the fights
between the employee and the thing above him.
You want to know and I’m going to tell you, thumb
your way through the employee handbook to the section
on workplace concerns and conflict resolution.
You’ll find a flowchart that was built to run
you through a process that was built to stun
you into thinking something will be done
about the thing you’ve documented and begun
to understand is systematic and not just one
bad manager on one bad day under the sun.
HR won’t help you here, HR is not your friend,
HR won’t help you here, HR works for the end
of things that might embarrass the institution.
HR won’t help you here, the solution
they offer is a conversation with the man
who wronged you, facilitated by the plan
that protects the company from any liability.
HR won’t help you here, their ability
is to manage you out of the situation.
HR won’t help you here, their vocation
is the protection of the company’s interests.
HR won’t help you here despite their best
presentation of themselves as neutral parties.
HR won’t help you here and that’s the hardest
thing to accept when you walk through that door.
HR won’t help you here, I said it before.
The form you fill is logged in a system,
the form you fill is logged and the wisdom
of the man who designed the system is apparent
in the way that nothing in it is transparent
to the person who submitted it. The form
goes somewhere and the protocol and norm
is that you’ll hear something in fourteen days
that gives you nothing and re-directs your gaze
to another form and another conversation,
another meeting and another medication
of the wound by the people who are trained
to make you feel attended to while the stained
behavior that you reported stays in place,
while the man who wronged you still has your face
in the same building, on the same floor, at the desk
that is directly in your sightline, and the rest
of the team watches the outcome carefully.
I know a man who documented forty things,
I know a man who documented forty things with wings
of evidence attached, forty instances
with dates and names and the witnesses
and a timeline that would hold up in any court.
And forty pages deep and the final report
was a performance improvement plan
with his name on it, not the other man’s.
The institution absorbs the complaint and then
the institution makes the complaint the problem.
The institution makes the man who documented,
the man who brought the issue and cemented
the record, the institution makes that man
the thing to be managed. It’s the plan
of every institution that has ever run
the HR process since the thing begun.
I am not filing anything else today.
I am not walking into that office to say
the thing again to the woman with the form.
I am not performing the institutional norm
of the complaint that goes nowhere and costs you
everything you’ve built here and it toasts you
with the company of the men who watched you try.
The company of the men who watched, and by
the time you left had learned the lesson clear
that HR won’t help you here.
My friend at the other company had a story,
my friend at the other company and the glory
of the process that he’d been through, three months deep
into the grievance mechanism, the sleep
he’d lost over it, the documentation
he’d assembled and the presentation
he’d given to the neutral party in the room.
And the outcome, which I knew before the doom
of his expectation hit him in the hall.
I knew before he told me, I know the call
the HR process makes at the end of the road.
I know the way the institution unloads
the grievance back onto the person who brought it.
I know the way the system never bought it,
never bought the idea that the man below
the management chain has anywhere to go
with what happened to him in the organization
but out, and that’s the final HR station.