Dive Brief:
- Neither workers nor bosses, human resources professionals straddle two worlds, according to a recent profile of the HR profession at Al Jazeera America.
- Most medium-size or larger offices, factories and warehouses have a human resources specialist or department on staff, according to the article, including the 275,000 who belong to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
- Attending the SHRM annual conference, the author explores how HR has evolved from its origins in "personnel" to include recruiting and hiring, compensation and benefits, legal compliance, training, discipline and employee relations -- becoming such an "influential component of modern work" that HR professionals "qualify as management under the labor laws." At the same time, HR remains "stuck in a netherworld between employer and employee," according to the article.
Dive Insight:
The decidely pro-employee article takes a look at HR's contradictions and challenges, mainly from a personal perspective of a few HR leaders from small employers. For example, author E. Tammy Kim, who formerly served as an attorney for low wage workers, interviewed Jackie Henderson, a vice president of HR with 18 years of experience. Henderson described the constant challenge of being “a liaison between the company and employee.”
Henderson had worked for a Fortune 500 manufacturer but left for her current job when she felt employees were experienceing unfair working conditions and the employer was being too hostile to employees trying to unionize, according to the article.
“We come down on the management side, but we’re more progressive than some management groups,” Mike Aitken, SHRM’s vice president of government affairs, told Kim, adding that 16% of SHRM’s members are from unionized businesses and government agencies. The rest are from the private sector. “We do work with the Chamber of Commerce, but we also work with unions.”
In the end, the article provides an outsider's look at HR, but it serves as an interesting perspective of the profession.
