In the nineteenth century, they were the ‘workers’. Later, the class associations of that term made it incompatible with the claims of modern democracy and they became ‘staff’. Then, in the terms of scientific management, they were ‘personnel’ before finally being transformed into ‘human resources’. Thus does our changing language neatly convey the different emphases which we have laid at different times on the role and status of employees. Not that all nineteenth-century employers were unsympathetic to their workers' interests – one has only to think of the Rowntrees or Cadburys or of Leverhulme at Port Sunlight to dismiss that idea – but ‘workers’ they were and remained, engendering a largely paternalistic concern for their well-being. The safe but impersonal ‘staff’ emphasised differentiation and hierarchy, while ‘personnel’ suggested that the problem of people had been managed once for all within a bureaucratic structure of hiring and firing arrangements and management/union negotiation. The human resource concept, which became popular in the 1980s, puts employees at the centre of the business stage. Companies which use their human resources effectively, it is claimed, gain a competitive advantage as employees are more committed and productive if they are well-informed, and have a sense of their own autonomy.