5.2 Limitations

Work hours were more regulated during Project 5 than on most traditional sites, with work ceasing by 6pm in consideration of patients and staff in adjacent hospital buildings. The new EBA introduced during the study makes allowances for flexible work start and finish times. While this is important in order to attract and retain workers with care responsibilities, the inconsistency of work hours, including requesting overtime at short notice, makes it very difficult for workers and their partners to plan their personal lives, or to fulfil personal commitments such as childcare, eldercare, regular exercise, hobbies or social events.

5.1.4 Unexpected findings and relevant learnings

WHO PAYS? The questions of who pays for working time modifications and work reductions and the benefits, trade-offs and other outcomes that might flow from the implementation of these strategies is an important one. In the case of Project 5, Health Infrastructure NSW, Roberts Co. and workers jointly paid a price for the shorter working week. Health Infrastructure NSW paid approximately 1% of the total value of the project and received a project on time and budget using safe and healthy workers. Roberts Co. paid for the cost of the other interventions, including wellbeing training to workers, wellbeing leave, improved amenities, redistribution of risk in the contract with subcontractors and investment in smartphone technology. Waged workers reduced their overtime work hours and income but also benefited from improvements to family life, work-life balance, and job satisfaction.

PRIORITISING WELLBEING AND INNOVATION IN PROCUREMENT To make the five-day week a reality on a major Sydney health care project required a creative mindset from the Health Infrastructure NSW and Roberts Co. team. Firstly, Health Infrastructure NSW encouraged innovation in worker wellbeing at the procurement stage of the Concord Hospital redevelopment. This enabled Roberts Co. to put forward a five-day week alternative program. Working collaboratively with contractors in the pre-contract stage of a project provided government with an innovative and necessary project delivery model that aligned with Health Infrastructure NSW’s core values. It also demonstrated that the pre-construction phase, which is often managed by the client, has a significant influence on site productivity. Piloting and testing the five-day work week sparked a discussion within government and industry about alternative procurement and project delivery models. Government clients and contractors play a critical role in sponsoring, testing and evolving project delivery interventions in the construction sector.

POPULARITY OF THE FIVE-DAY WORK WEEK While some workers were apprehensive at the start of Project 5, the majority of workers (75.4%) preferred a five-day work week over either a six- or seven-day working week (Figure 11). Waged workers preferred access to five to eight hours of overtime over a five-day working week. Across all age groups, there was a consistent preference for a five-day work week. Separated and divorced workers showed the strongest preference for the five-day work week ahead of those never married or married. Unexpectedly, during the study, the five-day work week was agreed to and finalised in the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union’s Enterprise Bargaining Agreement with Roberts Co. and other large contractors. This action demonstrated how quickly the workers adapted to the five-day work week and saw its value as a project delivery model, despite reducing their access to overtime across the week.

ECONOMIC SECURITY OF WOMEN Academic research has long detailed the barriers to women’s participation in the Australian construction sector. In this study, we disclosed the sector’s impact on female partners and families of construction workers. Notably, inconsistent and long work hours and work weeks in construction inhibit female partners from entering paid full-time employment, which in the medium term, reinforces traditional stereotypes of the male breadwinner and in the long term may act to impact the economic security of women as they retire with less superannuation.

DENIAL AND STIGMA Undeniably, the research team observed that for many workers, the majority of whom were men, found it difficult to engage in a discussion about the effect of work on their intimate relationship with their partner. Workers often denied or minimised the effect of construction work practices on their relationship. This was in contrast with their ability to discuss openly the effect of construction work on their relationships with their children and work colleagues. Their reluctance to open up on this topic was also in contrast to the extensive feedback offered by their partners. Whether workers were unaware or in denial about the effects of their work on their relationship, it does demonstrate that discussing problems on the home front may carry a stigma for construction workers and reinforces the gendered constraints that act against workers seeking help within the workplace. It may have also contributed to the challenges the research team faced in recruiting next of kin for the study via workers.

EFFECTS OF OTHER INTERVENTIONS It is important to recognise the other interventions that ran alongside the five-day working week. This included fairer and simpler construction contracts, breastfeeding rooms, wellbeing training for all workers, and several interventions for Roberts Co. employees (see section three for more details). Roberts Co. also has an above industry average safety record. The effect of these measures, while not subject to this study, should not be overlooked, as one intervention alone will not address the complexity of wellbeing, mental health and gender inequality in the construction sector. Rather, a constellation of targeted interventions by industry stakeholders is needed to shift the dial.

5.2 LIMITATIONS

The construction sector workforce is highly fluid, meaning that individual workers may not spend long periods of time on one site or may work on multiple sites in any week. Some workers we engaged with during Project 5 had little English language or