I have to agree with Country Gal on this one. Having had worked at a place that had a Frankensteins monster of individual contracts, relic group bargaining and with near 100% of floor workers as temporary casuals from a multiplicity of agencies I wouldnt wish the HR Officers position on anybody. No wonder they looked like frazzled cats pulled out of the well. Too much confusion over roles and responsibilities, envy over the inequality of co-workers pay and conditions led to inefficiency , skill decline, conflict played out daily. Daily internal politics were dominant over business.Daily it was the HR officers job to 'sort it out'. The chaos on the floor led to a high turn over of management, even customer complaints were on the rise. I am not a union man but evidently the company was efficient and properous when it was unionised and everybody was under a few umbrellas. I wonder if they are still in business?

Many years ago mining companies preferred to deal with unions, about one per worksite, rather than a myriad of small unions, because the payroll was simplified by paying a 3000 person strong workforce under one to five awards rather than having all employees on individual contracts. Fewer individual contracts would require fewer HR managers. At another higher education facility in Melbourne the HR department used to be very busy at the end of the financial year calculating the top management bonuses as how to distribute the gap between actual wages and wages allocated in the federal budget.

There are many finance industry workplaces in Melbourne that seem to prefer to hire backpackers on casual conditions. I am thinking big super fund managers and Computershare. These backpacker often don't understand English well enough to man the telephone help desks to which they are assigned.

Personally I would like to see an end to the high rates of casualised labour because its not fair to the workers hired under those practices and its grossly unfair to the customers/clients/contributors having to deal with such entrenched, systemic ineptitude.

HR in Australia?- to save a good-civilized-etc face of sometimes locally hiring bosses by automatically rejecting non-Christians, non-Anglos to pave a way for biologically appropriate overseas mates and relatives too often.

I must agree with the author. “The simple fact is the majority of the burgeoning HR industry in Australia is extraneous to the common good and welfare of both organisations and individuals. “

I have held the view since I first entered the workforce, that an HR department, regardless of the size of the organisation really needed one person only and they were there to advise line managers on the matters of employment law.

This was most profoundly illustrated some years ago when supplying consultative services to one of the major Australian Banking Groups.
I had to travel up and down the east coast states interviewing line managers. Each state was experiencing very high levels of staff turnover. One of my questions ended up being “Why is staff turnover so high”? It often too asking this question several times (the line managers not recognising the staffing management responsibility), then many line managers would start with comments which deferred the problem to HR.

What had happened over a number of years was the HR function had become so strident and assertive that it had usurped the Line managers role in the process of staff selection and control and undermined the line managers responsibility to the point these line managers no longer saw staffing their function as their responsibility. This is of course an organisational nonsense.

HR functions supply internal services to captive users. They are there to support line managers, not to direct them. The same is true of IT functions.

IT is another support process which provides an internal service to captive users. It too should not be elevated to the point where it dictates policy and strategy. Several of the state government departments I have worked with in recent years have IT functions which display a strident and dictatorial attitude and negative input to their users, similar to the HR role in the Bank.

Oh Michael K – why do you bother?

Excellent article Malcolm. I don't think I've dealt that much with HR, but that may be because I haven't realised I was speaking to HR- I thought they were management.

They are at best ineffective- I always seem to come out of harassment seminars feeling exceptionally horny...

You have definitely been too easy on HR recruitment firms. There are far too many of them. There are often multiple firms advertising the same job. They regularly go belly-up, so when you try to find their address in the phone book, about a third of the time they are not there, because they have recently changed their trading name. Other posters have pointed out that different workers regularly earn different wages for performing the same jobs. This pales into comparison when you find out just how much the Recruitment Agency is earning from your work.

One may be in need of an easy job, perhaps a couple of days work a week, in the inner city, to help pay the rent while you finish your degree. So you apply online, (yes, through Seek) for a stacking job in an inner city warehouse. It has been advertised on the very day you have applied for it. The next day you get called up by the Recruitment Agency, and you think "beauty, I'm in." They ask if you can travel to an outlying suburb of the city to their "head office," and you tell them, "just this once," because you don't have a car. They tell you there should be a bus from the station. There is never, I repeat never, a bus from the station. So you walk 50 minutes through gale force wind to the "head office," which you miss the first two times you walk past it. Once you find it, you are told to wait for 15 minutes and are given some forms to fill out, where you give exactly the same information which you emailed in your resume and cover letter the day before.

cont..

You are also given a summary of the Privacy Act, forms for a Superannuation Fund Manager you have never heard of, and a pamphlet on OHS and harassment. You then file in with half a dozen other people to a small room where you are shown a couple of videos on OHS and harassment, and are given the standard line that if you accept a job, you must turn up, because not only are you giving the company a bad name, you are depriving someone else of an opportunity to work. At this point, everybody in the room studies their shoelaces.

Finally you get to speak to someone one-on-one, where you are told that the stacking job you applied for- a couple of days a week in an inner city warehouse- has been filled, but there is a job available doing some cleaning in a commercial bakery in another outlying suburb four days a week. You explain that you don't have a car and need time to study. You are told that "it's only for two weeks, and we might be able to help you out with something more suitable after that." You really need the money, so you acquiesce. The next day, it takes three hours to get to the Bakery. When you get there you are given a brush and are told to clean the toilets. You walk out after 15 minutes, leaving a snapped broom behind. Then you realise you can get away with this, because you are in a massive, impersonal system, where reputation and loyalty means nothing. Who cares if you will never get work with that agency again? There are hundreds of others in this city alone, and the agency will probably go belly up by the end of the year anyway.

The system is creating a workforce of mercenaries.

Douglas Adams had a great idea- jettison the useless third of the planet's population into space, to crash into some distant planet. I nominate the extortion cartel that is the Recruitment Agency industry.