...Or at least it used to be. Now maybe in 2020 now, "people" can be replaced with "corporations".
I don't believe I've ever seen a post on HN about how wonderful a Human Resources department has ever been, or ever treated anyone fairly. Feel free to prove me wrong here.
If you can dehumanize humans, then you can treat them like objects. It's easier to do firings or layoffs, or cut back on pay raises and benefits.
But from a production point of view, the problem is when you think that a human is equivalent to another with the same title and they are easily interchangeable.