Don't Call Me Human Capital, Okay?

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Career Development  

Did you know that you are "human capital"? This is how your bosses, your bosses' bosses and the stockholders of your company think of you. You're not a male person or a female person, but a special brand of breathing and thinking animal called human capital.

You've been commoditized, dehumanized, reduced to a balance-sheet line item. Does that upset you? It makes my blood boil, and you ought to be equally riled.

So you're a project manager with clout. You have a lot of responsibility, you manage big-budget projects and lots of people. Management depends upon you and you should feel good. But, you're still human capital--high-priced human capital to be exact.

Origin of the term human capital? No one knows for sure, but a safe guess is it's at least a decade old. Wrong. The term "human capital" could have been used by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, explains Bill Lutz, author of Doublespeak Defined: Cut Through the Bull**** and Get the Point (HarperCollins, $12.95) and professor of English at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.

"Wasn't Marx writing about the commodification of labor?" Lutz asks. "It's come to pass. He wrote about plants, equipment and people. And that's what human capital means because we treat them all the same. They are all disposable, fungible and expendable. We even talk about investing in human capital, …

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