Bossman asks "can you write a script that makes a tar.gz of each user in the /home dir please?"
After a couple false starts involving the bash for loop (which I still think could solve the problem), and a quick glance at the find man page, I produce the one line result.
find /home -type d -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec tar cvf {}.tar.gz
{} ';'