> A person is not a resource outside of contexts in which chattel slavery exists.

Your reference to chattel inspired me. Consider the cow. Cows are resources. There are a ton of rules about what one can and cannot do with cows, but businesses still think of the "cow" as their resource, and "beef" and "milk" as some of the value they get from the resource.

Now, to your point on slavery, the rules for what you can and cannot do to people are very different from cattle. Of course, slavery is pretty irrelevant to whether someone is considered fungible (owning people is horrible, but it doesn't change whether they are interchangeable or not).

In practice resources are often suppliers and often the value the business extracts from them are provided under contract or at least a generalized regulatory framework. You are again confusing properties of certain kinds of resources with properties of resources in general.

Labour is very much how you marshall your "people" resources. It's a far more impersonal window through which to view people's relationships with businesses.

> Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units.

Check out the definition of a "resource". It's the asset you draw upon to accomplish something.

Strictly speaking, the real "resource" is the employment or contract with the person, not the labour. However, thinking in those terms is terribly impersonal and not terribly useful for reasoning about a business (outside of legal disputes); in reality the person(s) under a contract correlate with suitability, outcomes, etc. a heck of a lot more than the contracts themselves. So what you really think in terms of are the people, not the contracts.

> This dehumanizing confusion of supplier with the resource they supply seems to only happen with labor.

I have a hard time fathoming how it is dehumanizing to suggest that labour from one person is not the same as labour from another.