Yves here. Please pipe up in comments if you have come across similar expressions of contempt for workers from executives or management pundits. Mind you, I loathed the rebranding of “personnel” as “human capital” when that started, IIRC in the 1990s.
By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future
The Financial Times reports this morning that Standard Chartered plans to cut more than 7,800 back-office jobs by 2030. These cuts will mean around 15 per cent of its workforce will lose their jobs. The reason? It is rolling out artificial intelligence across its global operations.
Chief executive Bill Winters, however, was at pains to insist this was not really a redundancy programme. He told investors:
“It’s not cost cutting: it’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we’re putting in.”
Note that phrase: “lower-value human capital”.
Bill Winters is referring to real, live, warm-blooded people when making that observation. People with as much right to be alive right now as he has. People who are working for his bank in human resources, risk and compliance, and other bank back-office functions in offices in Bengaluru, Shenzhen, and Warsaw. Those people have skills, careers, and families dependent on their incomes. And the chief executive of the major bank they work for has just publicly described them to investors as “lower-value human capital”.
I am certain that this is not a slip of the tongue. It is the language of a very particular worldview. In that worldview, labour is a cost to be minimised, and people are inputs to be priced. When a cheaper substitute becomes available, you substitute. That is what the textbooks say. That is what the shareholder expects. And that, it seems, is what Bill Winters believes he is doing. This is neoliberalism writ large for all to see.
There is a brutal honesty in the formulation that is, in an odd way, clarifying. Most executives reach for euphemisms when discussing redundant programmes. They talk of transformation, of investment in the future, of reskilling and redeployment. Winters has not. He has said, plainly, that some of his workforce is, in his opinion, “lower-value” and he is replacing those people with financial or technological capital. At least his employees now know where they, and by implication most of the rest of us, stand in their CEO’s worldview.
The implication is that labour is now viewed as an inferior form of productive input compared to technology, automation, AI systems, software platforms, robotics, data systems, and financial investment in machinery. The assumption is that replacing people with capital equipment is inherently efficiency-enhancing. That says all we need to know about this bank, its management and the people from whom they wish to make money, many of whom will be “lower-value human capital”.
And it is important to note the relevance of the numbers quoted in the article. Standard Chartered employs around 80,000 people globally. The bank is targeting a return on tangible equity of more than 15 per cent by 2028, rising to around 18 per cent by 2030. In that case, these jobs are not going because the bank is struggling. They are going because the bank wants to increase its profitability for its shareholders. AI technology makes that possible, but more importantly, the ideology of its CEO permits it.
And this is where the story becomes about economics, and political economy, and not merely corporate power. If artificial intelligence is now capable of displacing thousands of skilled workers in financial services, the question that follows is not whether that is remarkable in the literal sense of that word, because, of course, it is. The question is who captures the gain, and who bears the loss?
The answer, right now, is entirely predictable. The shareholders gain. The workers in Bengaluru, Shenzen and Warsaw lose. And governments, in Britain and elsewhere, have nothing whatever to say about it, because nothing in the current political framework requires them to. That’s because they, too, subscribe to this same neoliberal logic.
That is the real issue here. What is troubling is not that a bank is using AI, or even that it is cutting jobs just to boost returns. It is that we have constructed an economic and political settlement in which it is considered entirely normal, entirely acceptable, and entirely unremarkable that a chief executive can describe his workforce as “lower-value human capital” in a briefing to investors, and nobody in government bats an eye.
The gains from artificial intelligence are built, in no small part, on publicly funded research, publicly educated workforces, and publicly maintained infrastructure. They are socialised in their origins. They are entirely privatised in their benefits. And our governments have decided that we as a society should simply accept that.
I do not think we should.
