“To help stimulate positive forces for
humanizing systems and organizations in national life
and enable people contribute their best.”

- from the statement of Objectives of the National HRD Network

Child labour is the current area of social attention and policy intervention amidst persisting controversies. The ILO has launched a global initiative for elimination of child labour and declared 12th June, 2002, as the first World Day against Child Labour. In the process of its active intervention, the ILO’s AP State Based Project sought to involve professional associations dealing with human resources as they can create influential groups for eliminating child labour.

Even as the HR professionals warmed up to the idea, albeit slowly, there were several apprehensions, some stated and many unstated. The apprehensions were varied. There were refrains of how aggressive elimination of child labour could affect the livelihood of those working at the subsistence level; how it could possibly be an insidious non-tariff barrier contrived by the western world; whether it would be practical at all; how embarrassing it would be for companies and their employees; whether the HR manager should be the “pall bearer” of the bad news and for what reason etc. The most important that had to be fixed was as to why the HR profession should be bothered about a controversial social scourge like child labour. In the address to the meeting of the HR professionals, I ventured to explore the relation between the HRD profession and Child Labour and found the need for the profession to restore the drifting foundations and reconnect with the societal concerns.

In the “mumbo-jumbo” of the new jargon supported by a gush of new products, technologies, concepts, speculations, and propositions, the HR profession appears to have a memory lapse of its roots. The roots of human resources management lie in its earlier role of protecting and promoting the welfare of employees. In the early factory system, so well animated by Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times”, employees were treated as commodity and exploited under stressful work conditions, long hours and low wages. Collectivist tendencies arose culminating in a strong leftist ideology that threatened to change the very social order. The State intervened with a host of welfare legislation, which included a defined role for a professional to safeguard and promote the interest of the workers against potential threats of exploitation. The statutory welfare officer, the Industrial Relations manager and the Personnel Managers were baptized through similar type of curricula that centred around welfare foundations, behavioural theories and organizational designs.

The idea of welfare in the HR context was to bring about conditions by which the employees are able to achieve their full potential – mental, physical, and psychological. Employers were prompted through legislation as well as management education to promote the welfare of employees and adopt an attitude and style that would result in more harmonious labour relations and higher individual productivity, loyalty and commitment.

Industrial relations and personnel management functions, often camouflaged as statutory welfare officers, thrived over the decades, enjoying enormous power. The times have been full of power play than welfare, belying theory, ethical feelings and law. This situation continues in several organizations where the personnel manager is seen as a strategist who can hoodwink, outsmart, and control the employees and their collectives into submissiveness under any condition.

Human Resources Managers arose from this tribe often rechristened than reformed. HRM had met with scorn, particularly in the UK, as it was less distinguishable in practice from the earlier versions. HRM was and is seen primarily as an American obsession that assumes the needlessness of unions. Despite such skepticism, HR management has grown in many companies during the last 20 years to replace the earlier versions of personnel management both in designations and actions.

HRM is currently dominated by efforts to align well with the strategy of the firm so that the latter gains competitive advantage and sustains it. All methods and practices, even if some of them are reminiscent of the commodity approach as implicit in the fashionable resource-based view (RBV), have taken the HR manager even farther away from his roots. There is a discernible disconnect. Reference to welfare becomes embarrassing to the HR manager, as it is neither fashionable nor intellectually challenging. It is, low tech and status depleting.

Yet, the HR manager must recall the curricula, the foundations of the discipline. That HR profession is people business and that it is inextricably connected with social concerns than any other corporate function. It is about time that the HR professionals rediscover their roots and moorings more deliberately. They must relate themselves to the society, better than they have in the recent years. To be a profession, a calling must demonstrate its commitment and connectivity with social well-being and progress – else, HR will be equated with any type of common calling than a profession.

It is coincidental that companies have also become sensitive, owing to NGO activism than wisdom, to aspects of the society. They are seriously debating the connectivity between corporate social responsibility, corporate governance and performance and have started adopting new standards of meeting social responsibilities and complying with the expectations of law and society.

It is for this reason, that Nike had to face tremendous adversity for sourcing its products from companies in the developing world where child labour was being exploited. Makers of footballs have had to face the same problem. Carpet makers are being forced to opt for certifications that no child labour is employed in making their products.

Corporates have also started adopting the triple bottom line approach to ensure that the companies brand equity and reputation improves in the market place. The triple bottom line refers to the financial, environmental, and social impacts. Financial and environmental reporting has by now become mandatory consequent to laws and regulations. However, the aspect of social responsibility is still in the realm of the company’s disposition towards its stakeholders and the society at large. The HR profession has an important role to play in promoting the welfare orientation and social responsiveness in the company. If HR profession does not take up people issues, who else will?

Possibly, companies and their Personnel/HR managers go through various phases before they become truly integrated with the stakeholder issues. In the first phase, as is the case with most companies, power play becomes the dominant aspect of management style and the game is to corner more pie than ones due. In the process, employees, unions and owners would have failed the consumer and the society causing more harm than good. As things progress, in the second phase the efforts would shift to productivity enhancement, resource optimization, and increasing the pie through productivity bargaining. Still, the social aspects would be minimal in the mind of the company and the personnel/HR functionary. In the third phase, human resources development comes into picture with definitive efforts at enhancing the skills and competencies of employees and the welfare of the permanent employees.

In the penultimate phase, the company will make some noise and statements to bestow attention to select stakeholders, particularly the consumers. During this phase, social responsibility would be considered as a reputation mechanism in the same manner as that of quality certification, six-sigma, SEI-CMM, etc. In the final phase, companies would have found the trick of optimizing shareholder, managerial and stakeholder interests and expanding the definition of welfare.

If companies have reached this stage, it is good for them to seriously look at a certification relating to social responsibility. This certification is called the Social Accountability (SA) 8000. The SA 8000, first released in 1997, was developed by a diverse group of organizations, which included trade unions, human rights activists, academia, retailers, manufacturers, contractors, and other functions. It was developed by the Council on Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency (CEPAA). The SA 8000 is designed to be the first international standard for companies seeking to guarantee the basic rights of workers. The provisions of SA 8000 include aspects of child labour, forced labour, health and safety, freedom of association, freedom from discrimination, disciplinary practices, work hours, compensation, and management practices. It is reported that some Indian companies have taken up the lead in actively eradicating child labour in the entirety of their processes within the company, upstream and downstream.

The human resources professional has an immediate responsibility to spearhead and propagate elimination of child labour as HR manager has control over aspects of values, ethics, management styles, and above all, people. It is imperative that the responsibility for social action lies in his sphere. The HR profession must remember that by promoting child rights it will be not only removing the hardship of labour amongst the children but also promoting their education and skill development. It is only by an enlarged vision that a human resource professional will be able to promote people development comprehensively not only within the company but in all his zones of influence. The typical zones of influence for a HRD professional will be the supplier-chain, the distribution and the retailing chain, peers and superiors, employees, the families of the employees, and various social organizations that come in contact with them.

The HR professionals’ associations have an immediate challenge to revisit the roots, and reestablish the important connectivity of the profession with social issues and become the torchbearer of eliminating child labour. In the process they would be improving human resource development through rehabilitative interventions