Thirty-two years on both sides of the site gate

Mandate

Bring site working hours within the statutory limits before April 2024, reform an age-based pay structure with the employees' union, and rebuild the supply of skilled craftsmen for the next decade.

Outcomes

• Average monthly overtime for site engineers fell from 71 hours (FY2018) to 34 hours (FY2025), with no breach of the annual limit in FY2024 or FY2025.
• Replaced our age-and-tenure pay table with role grades in April 2023; 41 engineers under forty appointed to lead sites in three years, against six in the previous five.
• Established Asakage Craft Works in October 2021; 212 craftsmen employed by March 2026, average age 31, with 89% two-year retention.
• Women site engineers rose from 44 (2017) to 151 (2026), and women leading sites from three to seventeen.

Decisions in context

I became chief human resources officer as the company's preparation for the April 2024 overtime limits entered its last three years. My remit covers HR, labour relations with our enterprise union, the training yard in Komaki and, jointly with procurement and safety, the workforce standards we set for partner firms. The largest pieces of work have been the role-grade pay reform negotiated with the union through 2022, the founding and growth of Asakage Craft Works, and the schedule page in large tenders, which I sign with the head of construction. I prepare the papers on executive succession and officer remuneration for the nomination and remuneration advisory committee, which an outside director chairs, and I leave the room when my own pay is discussed. I report working hours, including partner-crew and home log-on hours, to the audit and supervisory committee each quarter. I am an executive officer, not a director.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; completing the move of partner firms to monthly pay and preparing for the replacement of the technical intern programme.

Mandate

Move HR's attention from head-office administration to the sites, prepare the company for the overtime limits and stop the loss of young engineers, women in particular.

Outcomes

• Introduced the home-region declaration for all site engineers in 2018; voluntary turnover among women engineers fell from 11% to 4% a year.
• Set the schedule page for bids above ¥1bn from April 2020, built on closing sites eight days in every four weeks.
• Opened the Nagoya document support centre with 140 staff to take drawings and inspection records off site offices.
• Applied a facilities standard for site offices to every site by 2021.

Decisions in context

This was the period in which the company decided how it would meet the overtime limits and how it would keep the engineers it was losing. The home-region declaration came first, after exit interviews showed that the transfer list was driving women engineers out, and I insisted that it be open to everyone so that nobody could call it a concession. The schedule page came next. It took most of 2019 to persuade the construction division that hours should be priced at tender, and the president's decision to apply it to new bids from April 2020 was the turning point. I also began the analysis that led to Asakage Craft Works, after formwork shortages delayed two hospital projects in 2020. When the board created its nomination and remuneration advisory committee in 2018, I wrote its first papers on executive succession and on how officers' pay compared with that of listed peers.

Reason for the move

Promoted to managing executive officer and chief human resources officer.

Mandate

Make site working hours visible after an overwork-related illness was recognised, and raise social insurance enrolment among partner-firm workers.

Outcomes

• Replaced self-reported hours books with gate-entry and log-on records across all sites by 2014, roughly doubling recorded overtime.
• Raised social insurance enrolment among partner-firm workers from 61% to 98% by 2016, funded through explicit subcontract pricing.
• Renegotiated the Article 36 agreement with the employees' union, adding site-level monitoring of special clauses.

Decisions in context

Asakage asked me back after a young site engineer's mental illness was recognised as work-related, caused by sustained overtime. The company wanted someone who knew labour administration and had not grown up inside its habits. Many colleagues remembered me as a clerk in a site office, and I chose to earn standing through evidence rather than argue for it. The first year was spent comparing hours books with gate and log-on records, and the results surprised the executive committee far more than they surprised the engineers. I then turned to partner-firm workers, many of whom were not enrolled in health insurance or pensions because the cost had been squeezed out of subcontract prices. Our procurement division agreed to price enrolment explicitly, which made the improvement possible. This was also when I began working closely with our union's leadership, whose knowledge of the sites I had underestimated.

Reason for the move

Promoted to executive officer and head of human resources.

Mandate

Build a labour function for a company that had none, covering working hours, social insurance and accident response for its own staff and its subcontractors.

Outcomes

• Introduced the company's first written working-hours rules and monitoring of its Article 36 agreement across about 40 sites.
• Led the company's response, and its support for the family, after a subcontractor's scaffolder died on a revetment site in 2007.
• Required written head-office approval for evening and night work used to recover weather delays.
• Raised graduate recruitment from two to eleven a year by publishing site schedules and pay to applicants.

Decisions in context

Mizukuma was one of my consultancy clients, a family-owned civil contractor working mostly for prefectures and municipalities on river and road works. Its president asked me to build the labour function it had never had. I wrote its first working-hours rules, brought subcontractors' social insurance into its tender checks and learnt how a family board makes decisions. In 2007 a scaffolder employed by one of our subcontractors died after a fall while his crew worked into the evening to recover a schedule delayed by rain. I handled the investigation, the family's compensation claim and the conversations with his colleagues. The rule we introduced afterwards, that schedule recovery involving evening or night work needed written approval from head office, was the first time I saw a schedule decision treated as a decision about people. I studied for my MBA in the evenings during my last three years there.

Reason for the move

Recruited back to Asakage to lead a new site workforce and labour relations department.

Mandate

Prepare wage ledgers, working-hours agreements, social insurance enrolment and accident compensation claims for small construction firms.

Outcomes

• Grew the practice's construction portfolio from 18 to about 60 client firms.
• Moved 23 client firms from daily to monthly pay for at least part of their craftsmen.
• Prepared accident compensation claims for more than 90 injured workers.

Decisions in context

Fumiko Hatsukari had built a small practice serving construction subcontractors, and she taught me the trade from their ledgers upwards. Our clients were scaffolders, formwork carpenters, electricians and plasterers, most of them family firms with fewer than sixty employees. I learnt how a general contractor's price became a craftsman's daily wage, why social insurance was the first cost to disappear when margins fell and what a rained-off week did to a young worker's month. I prepared accident claims for injured workers and sat with employers through labour inspections. Persuading a firm to move its craftsmen from daily to monthly pay was slow work that depended on its own customers paying steadily, and I came to see that the decisions shaping my clients' workforces were mostly made by the contractors above them. That view has stayed with me on the other side of the contract.

Reason for the move

Asked by a client, Mizukuma Civil Engineering, to build its labour function in-house.

Career interval

From April to December 1998 I studied full-time for the certified social insurance and labour consultant examination, which I passed that autumn; I joined Hatsukari Labour Consultants once my registration was complete.

Mandate

Keep site office records, engineers' attendance and partner-firm entry lists on building projects in Yokkaichi and Nagoya.

Outcomes

• Supported four projects, including a chemical plant extension in Yokkaichi and a hospital in Nagoya.
• Rebuilt the partner-firm entry list on the hospital site so that every worker was recorded by name and employer rather than as a trade headcount.
• Applied twice for transfer to the career track; both requests were declined.

Decisions in context

I joined Asakage straight from university on the clerical track, as most women graduates in large Japanese companies then did. I worked in site offices rather than at head office, which turned out to be an education. I kept the engineers' attendance books, the daily reports and the lists of partner-firm workers entering the site. On the hospital project in Nagoya I persuaded the site manager to record partner workers by name and employer rather than as headcounts against each trade, after a worker was hurt and nobody in the office could say which firm employed him. I asked twice to move to the career track and was refused both times. Leaving in 1998 was a judgement that I would learn more about the people who build buildings from outside the company than from inside it. I did not expect to return.

Reason for the move

Left to qualify as a certified social insurance and labour consultant, since the clerical track offered no route into site management or professional HR.