Where a contractor's people decisions are really made

Construction was given five more years than most industries before the statutory overtime limits applied, and many contractors spent them hoping schedules would adjust themselves. I treat site working hours as something fixed at three points: the construction period accepted at tender, the staffing plan for the site office, and the way documents, inspections and client meetings are scheduled. HR owns none of those alone. My part is to put a reliable count of hours in front of the people who do, and to sign the schedule page in large tenders. We count hours from gate-entry and log-on records rather than self-reported books, and we compare site offices, our document support centre, home log-ons and partner crews, because hours that leave one record usually reappear in another. I also manage our Article 36 labour-management agreement with the union, including the special clauses we rely on, and report breaches to the audit and supervisory committee each quarter, including those we found late.

Most Japanese contractors still pay site engineers mainly on age and tenure and promote them to lead a site when their turn comes. That system once kept people for life. It now loses capable engineers at twenty-eight to developers and consultancies that offer responsibility sooner. I redesigned Asakage's pay structure around role grades defined by the scale and complexity of the site an engineer can run, assessed on evidence: projects actually led, qualifications held, safety records and a review by managers from another branch. I kept a reward for experience where skill genuinely accumulates with time, in estimating, structural checking and civil supervision, and protected the pay of every employee over fifty for five years. Reform of this kind is negotiated, not announced. I spent most of 2022 at the table with our employees' union, and the design changed in four places as a result. I report outcomes by age band to the nomination and remuneration advisory committee every year.

The average craftsman on our sites is over fifty, and the firms that employ them struggle to find apprentices. I work on succession in the trades through two routes. Asakage Craft Works employs formwork carpenters, rebar workers and scaffolders directly on monthly salaries, with a three-year training plan and a route to foreman. We also recruit from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines under the specified skilled worker system, which requires pay at least equal to a Japanese worker doing the same work, and we design that employment as a career rather than a term: Japanese lessons in paid hours, preparation for the higher skill level that permits longer stays and family accompaniment, and crew leadership. I pay close attention to the points where foreign workers are most exposed, including recruitment fees charged in their home countries, housing charges and the conduct of intermediaries, and I audit those rather than assume them.

A general contractor's own payroll is a small share of the people on its sites. Around 14,000 partner-firm workers appear on Asakage sites on a typical day, against roughly 1,450 of our own site engineers. I work with our procurement and safety divisions on the standards those firms must meet and on what we pay to make the standards possible: social insurance enrolment, registration of workers' qualifications and attendance in the industry's Construction Career Up System, wages that rise with recorded skill and schedules that do not depend on unpaid Saturdays. I learnt this work keeping the ledgers of small firms, and I start from their arithmetic. A standard imposed without being paid for is passed down to the lowest tier, where it turns into lower wages or unenrolled workers. I report partner-firm workforce measures to our board alongside our own, because a board that sees only employees sees a minority of the people who put up its buildings.

Women made up about 3% of our site engineers in 2017, and most of them left between their fifth and eighth year. Exit interviews pointed less to site conditions than to the transfer list: an engineer could be sent to any project in our territory at a few weeks' notice, for as long as the project lasted. I changed the policy for everyone rather than for women alone. Any engineer may declare a home region for up to six years without a pay or grade penalty, and larger sites are staffed so that two engineers can share a manager's duties across shifts. We also set a facilities standard for site offices covering changing rooms, toilets and rest areas, which many partner firms have since adopted for their own crews. We now disclose the share of women in management, the gender pay gap and men's uptake of parental leave in our annual securities report, and I explain the figures beside them rather than publishing them bare.