ABSTRACT
It could be argued that referring to employees as human resources – another input in the production process – dehumanizes workers (Schied 1995) and that human resource development (HRD) is essentially about how to improve that input in order to extract additional value (surplus labor) from that resource. The idea that increased learning and education results in increased labor productivity has been argued as the keystone of human capital theory (HCT) for some time (for a critique of HCT see Bouchard 2006). The role that unions have historically played in educating members, including skills development, has been overlooked in the recent literature much of which has become exclusively focused on HRD in the service of the work organization/ corporation – reflecting a unitarist perspective adopted by researchers either consciously or unconsciously.
