98 Fun Facts About Human Resources

Which 1938 US law created the federal minimum wage and time-and-a-half overtime pay?

Fair Labor Standards Act: its first workweek cap was 44 hours, not 40, stepping down to 40 by 1940; it also banned 'oppressive child labor'.

What was the first federal minimum wage set in 1938?

25 cents an hour came to about $11 a week, and Franklin Roosevelt mocked any 'calamity-howling executive' on $1,000 a day who claimed such pay would wreck American industry.

What hourly federal minimum wage took effect in July 2009?

$7.25 was the last of three yearly steps set by a 2007 law, which ended a freeze at $5.15 that had lasted almost ten years.

How many weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave does the FMLA guarantee eligible employees?

12 weeks was hard won: a family-leave bill was first drafted in 1984 and brought to Congress every year after, surviving two presidential vetoes before it became law.

Which president signed the Family and Medical Leave Act into law?

Bill Clinton signed it in his third week as president; his predecessor had twice vetoed similar bills passed by Congress.

Which president signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, creating OSHA?

Richard Nixon signed it when about 14,000 American workers were dying on the job each year; the act created OSHA to enforce safety rules and NIOSH to research them.

Which section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment discrimination?

Title VII gained the word 'sex' through a one-word floor amendment from Howard Smith, a Virginia segregationist who opposed the whole bill; the House adopted his amendment 168 to 133.

Which federal agency, established in July 1965, enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws?

EEOC opened in 1965 with no power to sue: it could only investigate and seek voluntary settlements until Congress let it take employers to court in 1972.

Which practice did the Age Discrimination in Employment Act outlaw in 1986?

Mandatory retirement had stayed legal at 65 under the 1967 act, which protected only workers aged 40 to 65; the cap rose to 70 before Congress scrapped it for most jobs.

Which president signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963?

John F. Kennedy signed it while noting that the average woman earned only 60 percent of a man's wage, and called the law 'a first step'.

Which president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law?

George H. W. Bush signed it months after activists left their wheelchairs and crutches at the foot of the Capitol and hauled themselves up its steps to demand the stalled bill.

The ADA excuses an employer from an accommodation that would cause what?

Undue hardship means significant difficulty or expense measured against the employer's own size and budget, so a large firm must do more than a small one; those with under 15 staff are exempt.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is better known by what name?

The Wagner Act, named for its Senate sponsor, met open defiance: opponents advised employers to disregard it as unconstitutional, and injunctions paralyzed its board until the Supreme Court upheld it by one vote in 1937.

The Taft-Hartley Act, which curbed union power after World War II, became law over which president's veto?

Harry Truman vetoed it in June 1947 as 'unworkable', but Congress overrode him within days by a wide margin, with many of his fellow Democrats voting against him.

Which automaker's 1963 South Bend plant closure gave momentum to the 1974 pension law ERISA?

Studebaker's pension plan was so underfunded that when the South Bend plant shut, thousands of workers lost most or all of what they had been promised; the scandal drove the 1974 ERISA reforms.

Which US law lets workers who leave a job keep their employer's group health coverage at their own expense?

COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act: the health-coverage rule was one part of a sprawling 1985 budget bill, which is why its name says nothing about insurance.

How much notice of a mass layoff does the WARN Act require from employers with 100+ workers?

60 days is also the size of the penalty: an employer who skips the notice owes each worker back pay and benefits for every day it fell short, up to 60.

USERRA, a 1994 law, guarantees which group their jobs back after time away?

Military service members return on an 'escalator': the law puts them in the job, seniority and pay they would have reached had they never left, not merely the post they held.

GINA, enacted in 2008, prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of what?

Genetic information is off limits even for catching a culprit: in 2015 a jury awarded $2.2 million to two workers whose employer swabbed their DNA to find who was fouling its warehouse.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill signed by which president?

Barack Obama signed it on January 29, 2009; it resets the 180-day clock for equal-pay claims with every discriminatory paycheck, reversing the 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear ruling.

Which document must every US employer complete to verify a new hire's identity and work authorization?

Form I-9 dates from a 1986 immigration law that made it illegal to knowingly hire unauthorized workers, so every new hire, citizens included, must show documents proving the right to work.

Which is the only US state where firing a worker past probation generally requires good cause?

Montana's 1987 Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act makes it the lone state to replace at-will firing by statute; a worker dismissed without good cause can recover up to four years of lost wages.

Which workplace term did Marilyn Loden coin at a 1978 panel on women's careers?

Glass ceiling was Loden's reply, by her own account, to fellow panellists who blamed women's poor self-image for their stalled careers; she was working in HR in the telecoms industry at the time.

In April 2024, which US agency issued a rule banning non-compete agreements nationwide?

Federal Trade Commission members voted 3-2 for the ban, but it never took effect: a federal judge in Texas set it aside nationwide in August 2024, two weeks before its start date.

Who wrote the 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management?

Frederick W. Taylor claimed his methods let a Bethlehem Steel laborer he called Schmidt load 47 tons of pig iron a day instead of 12.5, for a 60 percent raise.

The Hawthorne studies of the 1920s were conducted at a plant belonging to which company?

Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, made telephone equipment; its lighting tests found no clear link between light levels and output, which pushed the researchers to look for other causes.

Which Harvard professor's work on the Hawthorne studies helped found the human relations movement?

Elton Mayo, an Australian called in to the plant in 1928, concluded the test-room women were producing more because they had become a team, not because of the rest breaks or pay being tested.

In what year did Abraham Maslow publish "A Theory of Human Motivation"?

1943, in Psychological Review; Maslow never drew the famous pyramid himself, which appeared in later textbooks and consultants' diagrams.

In Herzberg's two-factor theory, what are the conditions that merely prevent dissatisfaction called?

Salary and safe conditions are hygiene factors: their absence upsets people, but their presence does not motivate.

Who developed Theory X and Theory Y, the contrasting models of how managers view workers?

Douglas McGregor is often seen as Theory Y's advocate, yet his MIT colleague Edgar Schein found him discouraged that Theory Y had hardened into a creed as rigid as Theory X; he wanted managers to question their own assumptions.

Which management thinker's 1954 book The Practice of Management introduced management by objectives?

Peter Drucker's basic ideas here were not all his own: he pulled existing management practices into one complete system, in which each person's goals are tied to the company's and results are measured against them.

Which economist first used the term "human resource", in his 1893 book The Distribution of Wealth?

John R. Commons used 'human resource' in passing in The Distribution of Wealth; the modern sense dates to a 1958 report by E. Wight Bakke.

Which university opened the first School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 1945?

Cornell's ILR School was founded to train labor and management side by side: Governor Thomas Dewey promised it would be neither a 'labor school' teaching dogma nor a management school.

In which Virginia city is the main US professional society for HR managers based?

Alexandria became the society's home after its board voted in 1984 to leave Berea, Ohio, for the Washington area, seeking a national presence and a steadier voice on workplace policy.

The CIPD, the UK's professional HR body, was founded in 1913 under what name?

Welfare Workers' Association was the 1913 name, chosen at a founding meeting in York; the body became the Institute of Personnel Management in 1946 and the CIPD in 2000.

How many personality types does the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sort people into?

16 types come from four either-or choices (2 x 2 x 2 x 2); Katharine Briggs had begun a personality system of her own, then took up a published theory of types, which her daughter Isabel Myers turned into a questionnaire.

Which Swiss psychiatrist's 1921 book inspired the Myers-Briggs test?

Carl Jung's Psychological Types reached Katharine Briggs in its 1923 English translation; she saw it went far beyond the personality system she had been building herself and took up his ideas.

The nine-box grid used in talent reviews plots performance against what?

Potential gets its own axis because top performers are not always future leaders: the nine boxes separate today's results from tomorrow's promise when planning development and succession.

Input gathered on an employee from peers, subordinates, supervisors and even customers is known as what?

360-degree feedback is usually collected anonymously, because people rate a boss or colleague more frankly when their names are left off.

According to the Peter principle, every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to what?

Their level of incompetence: each promotion rewards competence until the employee reaches a job they cannot do; Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull meant the 1969 book as satire.

Which HR thinker is credited with the 'HR business partner' model?

Dave Ulrich's model pushed HR from administration toward strategy, dividing the function into shared services, centers of expertise and business partners who sit close to the business.

Who co-founded LinkedIn, which launched in May 2003?

Reid Hoffman had tried this before: in 1997 he started SocialNet.com, an early social networking site, left it for PayPal in 2000, then built LinkedIn with former colleagues from both.

HR software giant Workday was founded in 2005 by executives from which company after Oracle acquired it?

PeopleSoft founder David Duffield and executive Aneel Bhusri started Workday in 2005, months after Oracle completed its hostile takeover of PeopleSoft; the product launched in 2006.

In 1986 the Supreme Court first ruled that which workplace wrong breaks the Civil Rights Act?

Sexual harassment reached the Court through Mechelle Vinson, who had started at a bank as a teller-trainee; all nine justices agreed that a hostile workplace is itself a form of sex discrimination.

Which character is the mild-mannered HR representative on the US version of The Office?

Toby Flenderson is played by Paul Lieberstein, a writer on the show who went on to run it for four seasons; as HR, Toby answers to corporate, not to Michael Scott, who loathes him.

What daily wage did Ford introduce for its line workers in January 1914?

$5 was not a flat raise: much of it was a profit-sharing bonus, paid only to workers who met Ford's rules, and one aim was to stop men leaving the monotonous assembly line.

In the comic strip Dilbert, which character is the 'evil director of human resources'?

Catbert was meant to appear in only a few strips, but readers gave the unnamed cat his name and demanded more, and he stayed on as the 'evil director of human resources'.

Which company is credited with the first personnel management department, around 1900?

National Cash Register owner John Henry Patterson created it to handle grievances, discharges and safety after a series of strikes and lockouts.

Psychologist William Moulton Marston, whose ideas underpin the DISC test, also created which superhero?

Wonder Woman debuted in 1941, years after Marston devised the systolic blood-pressure test, an early lie detector that became one part of the modern polygraph.

Jeweler Willard Bundy's 1888 time clock for workers launched a business that later became part of which tech giant?

IBM grew out of a 1911 merger that folded Bundy's time-recorder firm in with makers of scales and tabulating machines; Australians came to call a time clock a 'bundy'.

Which office fixture did designer Robert Propst create for Herman Miller in the 1960s and later come to regret?

The cubicle launched in 1967 as Action Office II, meant to give staff a more flexible environment; Propst later regretted that firms had turned his idea into boxes for packing people in.

In which country did about 90% of women stop work for a day in October 1975 to protest unequal pay?

Iceland ground to a halt as women skipped paid jobs, housework and childcare alike, and its parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal rights the following year.

In which 2009 film does George Clooney play a consultant whose job is firing other companies' staff?

Up in the Air filled out its firing scenes with real people who had recently lost their jobs, recruited through newspaper ads in St. Louis and Detroit.

Which Japanese term, translated as 'overwork death', describes sudden deaths blamed on punishingly long working hours?

Karoshi was first reported in 1969, when a 29-year-old worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company died of a stroke.

Which pioneering industrial psychologist and mother of twelve had her family life told in the book Cheaper by the Dozen?

Lillian Gilbreth applied time-and-motion studies to her own household, and later helped develop the modern kitchen and its linear layout.

Casual Friday grew out of a 1960s garment-trade campaign aimed at office workers in which US state?

Hawaii's Fashion Guild lobbied for 'Aloha Friday', which officially began in 1966 so that men could wear aloha shirts to work on the last business day of the week.

The 2022 adult animated comedy Human Resources, set in an office of hormone monsters, is a spin-off of which series?

Big Mouth introduced the hormone monsters as guides to puberty; Human Resources follows them back to their workplace, where they also manage the feelings of adults.

Which company scrapped fixed vacation days and posted its 'freedom and responsibility' culture guide online in 2009?

Netflix found that its public culture guide worked as a hiring filter, putting off people who would not have suited the company before they ever applied.

Which 'law', coined in a 1955 Economist essay by a naval historian, says work swells to fill the time allowed for it?

Parkinson's law began as satire: its author pointed to Britain's Admiralty, which kept adding officials even as its number of ships declined.

Which General Electric boss pioneered 'rank and yank', the routine firing of the bottom 10% of performers?

Jack Welch's 'vitality curve' sorted staff into a top 20%, a vital middle 70% and a bottom 10% of 'nonproducers' who, he argued, should be fired.

Which Yahoo chief executive caused an uproar in February 2013 by ordering remote employees back into the office?

Marissa Mayer had revealed she was pregnant on the day Yahoo hired her, and two months after the remote-work ban she lengthened the company's maternity leave.

Which buzzword, spread through TikTok in 2022, describes doing only what a job requires and nothing beyond it?

Quiet quitting involves no actual departure: the person stays in the job, in a softer cousin of the work-to-rule protests that unions have long used.

Which name for a workplace trend that took off in 2021 was coined by management professor Anthony Klotz?

The Great Resignation got its name in May 2021, when Klotz predicted a sustained mass exodus; he later predicted that the rate would level off in 2023.

Which country wrote a 'right to disconnect' from work email into its labour code, in force from January 2017?

France made firms with more than 50 employees negotiate the hours when staff may switch off their devices, though the law does not oblige them to reach a deal.

Which condition, described by Herbert Freudenberger in a 1974 paper, does the WHO class as an 'occupational phenomenon'?

Burnout reached psychology through Freudenberger's 1974 paper on exhausted staff; the WHO defines it as the result of chronic workplace stress but not as a medical condition.

The 'change curve' that firms use to manage restructuring is adapted from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of what?

Grief gave managers a map: Kübler-Ross drew her stages from work with terminally ill patients, and from the 1980s firms used them to manage organizational change.

The word 'salary' comes from the Latin 'salarium', which derives from the Latin word for which everyday commodity?

Salt gave Latin its word 'salarium', but the popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in it has no support in ancient sources.

Nepotism takes its name from the Italian word for which relative, whom Renaissance popes often promoted to high office?

Nephew is 'nepote' in Italian, and popes sworn to celibacy gave cardinals' hats to theirs; some of those 'nephews' were in fact the popes' own sons.

Which group of 11,345 striking federal employees did the Reagan administration fire in August 1981?

Air traffic controllers walked out although federal strikes were illegal; Reagan gave them 48 hours to return, then fired those who stayed out and barred them from federal service for life.

Which 1999 Mike Judge comedy features 'the Bobs', two consultants brought in to help the software firm Initech downsize?

Office Space flopped at the box office but became a cult favorite on home video, and Swingline began selling a red stapler because of the one in the film.

In the TV thriller Severance, which fictional company splits employees' memories between their work and personal lives?

Lumon Industries is a sinister biotech firm whose 'severance' procedure leaves staff remembering nothing of the office once they go home; Ben Stiller spent years developing the show.

Which 1980 comedy stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as office workers taking revenge on a sexist boss?

9 to 5 grew out of Jane Fonda's friendship with the founder of a real Boston group of the same name, which organized women office workers.

Which annual workplace event did the Ms. Foundation for Women create in New York in 1992, backed by Gloria Steinem?

Take Our Daughters to Work Day set out to make girls visible in the workplace, and it was officially widened to include boys in 2003.

Which cereal maker's founder put his Battle Creek plant on four six-hour shifts during the Great Depression?

Kellogg's shortened its shifts so that more people in the town could have a job, and a few departments held on to the six-hour day until 1985.

Which chocolate maker's Quaker owners built the alcohol-free model village of Bournville for their factory workers?

Cadbury moved its factory out of central Birmingham and built homes around it; because George Cadbury was a temperance Quaker, no pub was ever built in the village.

Which country's tech workers protested in 2019 against '996', meaning 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week?

China's programmers launched the '996.ICU' campaign on GitHub, a name warning that the schedule would put developers in an intensive care unit.

Which term describes employers barring staff from work during a dispute, as NBA team owners did to players in 2011?

Lockout is the employer's answer to a strike, and the NBA's 2011 one lasted 161 days and cut the regular season from 82 games to 66.

In Abraham Maslow's original five-level hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top, above esteem?

Self-actualization crowns the famous pyramid, yet Maslow never drew one: the diagram first appeared in the work of a consulting psychologist, Charles McDermid.

Which French phrase names the hands-off leadership style Kurt Lewin described in 1939 beside autocratic and democratic?

Laissez-faire leaders hand every decision to their followers, so completely that some researchers class the style as an avoidance of leadership.

In George Doran's original 1981 SMART goals, which word did the A stand for, before 'attainable' became common?

Assignable meant defining clearly who was responsible for the goal; popular versions later swapped in words such as attainable, relevant and timely.

Which HR process, a usual first step before hiring, produces both a job description and a job specification?

Job analysis collects what a role really involves, often by interviewing the people who do it, and the written description and specification follow from it.

Donald Kirkpatrick's four-level model, which runs from 'reaction' through to 'results', is used to evaluate what?

Training programs are judged on trainees' reaction, learning, behavior and results in the model, which Kirkpatrick set out for a wide audience in a 1959 series of journal articles.

Which rating error did Edward Thorndike name in 1920 after officers scored soldiers' unrelated traits too alike?

Halo effect was Thorndike's name for one general impression colouring every other score: the officers' ratings of physique, intellect and leadership tracked each other too closely.

The effect in which a manager's high expectations lift a team's performance is named after which figure of Greek myth?

Pygmalion was the sculptor whose statue came to life; psychologists borrowed his name for a study arguing that teachers' expectations shaped how well their pupils did.

Which model of motivation, built on valence, instrumentality and a third variable, did Victor Vroom propose in 1964?

Expectancy theory treats motivation as a choice: Vroom argued that people weigh whether effort will pay off before deciding how hard to work.

Which 1981 book by William Ouchi urged American business to meet the Japanese challenge with jobs for life?

Theory Z spent more than five months as a New York Times best-seller, arguing that stable employment and concern for staff off the job build loyalty.

Which psychologist proposed in 1965 that every team develops through forming, storming, norming and performing?

Bruce Tuckman added a fifth stage in 1977, 'adjourning', for the moment a team finishes its task and breaks up; some texts call it 'mourning'.

Which New York Times science journalist's 1995 bestseller turned 'emotional intelligence' into a workplace buzzword?

Daniel Goleman's book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for a year and a half and is in print around the world in dozens of languages.

Google's Project Aristotle, a multi-year search for the ideal team, found which factor mattered most by far?

Psychological safety, the belief that teammates can take risks without being shamed, outranked dependability, structure, meaning and impact in Google's findings.

Which goal-setting system did investor John Doerr learn at Intel in the 1970s and introduce to a young Google in 1999?

OKRs, short for objectives and key results, were taught to Doerr by Andrew Grove, whose in-house name for the method was 'iMBOs'.

Which consulting firm's Steven Hankin coined the phrase 'the war for talent' in 1997, later the name of a book?

McKinsey consultants expanded the phrase into a 2001 book of the same name, and it became shorthand for the fight to hire and keep skilled staff.

Which polling company's chairman, Don Clifton, developed the StrengthsFinder assessment?

Gallup renamed the test CliftonStrengths after its creator, and by 2015 some 467 of the Fortune 500 companies were using it.

Which term for negotiation between unions and employers was first used in 1891 by British reformer Beatrice Webb?

Collective bargaining was Webb's coinage; she was also among the founders of the London School of Economics and a leading figure in the Fabian Society.

Which arrangement, requiring union membership before a worker could be hired, did the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act outlaw?

Closed shop deals let a union decide who could be hired at all; the 1947 law banned them across the United States, and Britain followed with its Employment Act 1990.

Which London-born cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor and led it almost continuously from 1886 to 1924?

Samuel Gompers was sent to work as an apprentice cigar maker at the age of ten, and lost the union's presidency only once, for a single year.

Which kind of pledge, in which a worker promised never to join a union, did the 1932 Norris–LaGuardia Act outlaw?

Yellow-dog contract was the labor press's name for it from 1921: one editorial said that signing reduced a man to the level of a yellow dog.

Who became the first woman in a US presidential cabinet when Franklin Roosevelt made her Secretary of Labor in 1933?

Frances Perkins stayed until 1945, the longest anyone has held the post, and accepted it only after handing Roosevelt a list of measures to help workers.

Which company's CEO Joseph Wilson and its Black employees formed the first employee resource group after a 1964 riot?

Xerox's caucus set out to tackle discrimination inside the firm after the Rochester race riot, and in 1970 the company launched the National Black Employees Caucus.