HR the haven of cowards. I have never dealt with someone from that department, 21 years of experience with 6 companies, that had any courage. Wait there was one but the rest sucked in general.
Through the years "they" decided to broaden Steve and get him involved in more and more aspects of HR ~ like running non-RIF RIFs. (USPS lost several really big cases that cost them hundreds of millions for having violated the laws concerning Veterans' Preference BTW, but this is not about that).
Steve became the Angel of Death for management and staff. When he came around to talk to you it meant your office was being abolished, or maybe you would lose your job, or be demoted ~ and all for no reason at all, but Steve was the messenger for top management in these matters.
Slowly but surely as he got older Steve handled things like this less well, and I think he began to suffer some serious mental deterioration as the work he was doing became less and less consistent with his personal knowledge base.
He knew the rules ~ management didn't ~ and he knew what was unlawful, or at least highly questionable.
I retired a couple of years before he did, but I'd won several federal government wide precedental cases against USPS regarding RIFs and reassignments.
In the end I was the only guy Steve could talk to man to man. I didn't fear him. He feared me.
HR is just the enforcement arm of the management team, that's all.
Most of the places I've worked have used it to bump up their Affirmative Action Quotas....can't do that at the sharp end of the stick, but within HR, there's plenty of room. An added bonus is that the positions are forward-facing, so that the company gets a "two-fer".
Plenty more places that I've worked use it as a passive-aggressive method of enforcement. Older ladies, unfailingly polite, bring in cookies on Friday, and so on. Then, they hit you with a "Please, just be a dear and sign off on this re-vamped employment agreement. You're the last one, it's Friday, and we can all go home as soon as you sign off."
Worthless Bureaucrats, all.
I work extensively with a small technology company. They were talking about needing to bring in an HR person to handle some of the day-to-day. The owner squelched it by saying "We're having fun right now. Why bring in HR and put a stop to it?" :-)
HR is the American corporate version of the zampolits in the Soviet military. The function of the zampolit (political officer) was to not only be a pain in the @$$, but to be a major threat to the authority of the military commander and a threat to all subordinates. Any action or statement was evaluated by the zampolit to see if there was any political disloyalty, real or imagined. On the whole, the zampolit was beyond useless, in fact, an obstacle.