Inside the organization that’s trying to finally unionize architecture
The highest profile effort to unionize the architecture industry has just failed. On Friday, votes were tallied on a unionization petition at the Oslo- and New York-based architecture and design firm Snøhetta, and in a 35 to 29 vote, the 65 employees in its U.S. studios voted against what would have been the architecture industry’s second private sector union.
“The majority of employees made it clear that they opposed this direction for our workplace,” the firm’s management said in a statement. “We look forward to working together as one studio to continue building on our legacy of creativity and collaboration.”
It’s a notable defeat for a broader labor organization effort in an industry that has been notorious among its low- and mid-level workers for long, unpredictable hours, incommensurate pay, and fickle job security. Following the September 2022 formation of a union at Bernheimer Architecture, a New York-based firm of 22 people, this recent union vote at 350-person, nine-studio Snøhetta is a sign that change may be slow to come for the architecture industry.
The organization campaigns at these firms—and a growing number of others—has been shepherded by Architectural Workers United (AWU), a coalition of workers at architecture firms formed in early 2021 that’s affiliated with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), with which the one unionized firm is associated. Andrew Daley is a staff organizer at IAMAW and the informal figurehead of AWU, and he focuses specifically on supporting workers to create unions at design architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design firms.
Daley’s work organizing labor in the architecture industry is both a blank slate and unknown territory, as the closest thing history has had to an architecture union was a mishmash of mostly public sector workers called the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians that lasted for about a dozen years leading up to World War Two. Since then, American architecture firms, which number in the thousands, are all individual entities. There’s no overarching or unifying structure, like the school system for teachers or a retailer for all its stores’ employees. “It’s oddly different than other industry. There’s literally no proliferation of unions in any way, shape, or form,” says Daley. “Like, zero density when we started.”
In just two years, AWU has helped plant the seeds of a nascent but growing labor movement within the design world. With one successful campaign to its credit but also some high-profile losses, AWU is trudging an uphill battle to change an industry from within. Despite the Snøhetta union being voted down, AWU is continuing work on several other active union campaigns in architecture and design firms across the country. It’s leading what could be the most impactful change to the architecture industry in decades.
Before he became the organizer behind Architectural Workers United, Daley was an architectural worker himself. He’s a licensed architect and had a dozen years of experience working in firms across the country. Most recently he spent seven years working for SHoP Architects, a large firm in New York known for its design of the Barclays Center, a sports and concert venue in Brooklyn. He knows the industry’s downsides well, from late nights to last-minute changes on drawing sets to unrealistic client expectations to the internal chaos all these conditions create.
These pitfalls have been accepted as realities by architectural workers who often spend nearly a decade and tens of thousands of dollars earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees and gaining the requisite experience to qualify for and pass licensure exams in a field that pays its early-career practitioners between $55,000 and $80,000 a year on average.
Labor concerns like long hours and low pay have dogged the industry for nearly a century, but they’ve drawn increased attention in the past decade, as union campaigns have gone from the fringes of labor disputes to some of the biggest corporations in American business. In 2013, Yale architecture professor Peggy Deamer founded a nonprofit group called the Architecture Lobby to advocate for the value of architectural work within the industry. The group called for major changes to the way architecture firms and the architecture industry operate, including an end to unpaid labor, a living wage and compensation for pervasive overtime, and a demand for compensation from clients that matches the value of the work architecture firms do.
These issues have become the main pillars of the unionization efforts now underway, and AWU grew out of the Architecture Lobby’s efforts into its own separate organizing entity. “Without their work, the idea of unionizing at any given firm would never really happen,” Daley says of the Architecture Lobby.
Daley got involved with the group’s New York chapter, which had a subgroup focused on realizing its labor goals by establishing unions inside architecture firms. It was the late 2010s, and the group was ready to start organizing, marking the first efforts since the 1930s to bring unions into the architecture industry. “They were saying, ‘We can talk about this all we want, but ultimately we need to see it happen at a firm,’” says Daley. “A few folks at a few different firms were all discussing it at the same time. One of those was SHoP.”
Jennifer Siqueira worked alongside Daley as an architect at SHoP at the time. “I’ve been interested in unionizing for a long time, but I thought it was a very far-fetched thing for architects,” she says. Social concerns, she says, were not top of mind for many of her colleagues, or for the business-focused management of firms she was familiar with. “Politics is not something we explicitly talk about. On the ownership side, there’s always a fear that politics may have a negative impact on getting projects or clients. There’s just an atmosphere of conservatism within the profession,” Siqueira says.
This grew into a problem for Siqueira in May 2020. She and some coworkers had been advocating for more diversity in the office when the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests over racial inequality and police brutality. “A lot of us were trying to figure out a way to come out in support of the protests or against police brutality. Corporate firms were putting out statements, and we were pushing for our firm to put out a statement as well, but there was pushback on that,” she says.
The muted response led Siqueira, Daley, and others at SHoP to start an informal group to talk about ways they could change the organization from the inside. “There was this bubbling up of issues that were surfacing by us meeting together and pushing for certain things to be done by management towards diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Siqueira says. Other areas of concern were more endemic to the industry, including persistent overtime work that often had SHoP workers putting in 50 to 60 hour workweeks, and a feeling that low fees charged to clients devalued the work being done by the architects there. By the fall of 2020, several months into the pandemic, these conversations evolved into talk of unionization.
As most unionization pushes go, the SHoP organizing effort started underground. Because of the pandemic, it also happened mostly remotely, with workers like Daley and Siqueira sussing out interest among their colleagues via Zoom. “In some ways that was advantageous, because people were looking to reconnect in other ways, so jumping on Zoom with somebody wasn’t weird,” says Daley. “It was like, ‘Hey haven’t caught up with you in a while, I’d love to talk about some stuff.”
The union organizing progressed covertly across most of 2021, under the guidance of the IAMAW and with the support of a coalition of workers now working under the name Architectural Workers United. Daley eventually left SHoP in the fall of 2021; Siqueira was let go a few months later in a round of layoffs. Two weeks after that, workers at the firm formally submitted a letter to management laying out its plans to hold a union vote, with an estimated 60% of staff on board. An article on the effort was published in the New York Times. AWU saw its Instagram account’s followers quickly jump from a few hundred to more than 10,000.
Within two months, the organizers at SHoP pulled their petition. “They faced a pretty aggressive anti-union campaign,” Daley says. Workers there said management warned that unionization would likely affect its ability to secure new clients, therefore hurting the business. (“Any allegations of bad faith campaigning are unfounded,” SHoP’s management said in a statement at the time.) “The fact is, [the firm’s management] didn’t want unionization to happen at SHoP,” says Daley. “They did everything in their power to make that not happen.”
Losing business is a primary worry for architecture firms, and a frequently used reason for opposing unionization. Management at one firm told Fast Company that because clients always have multiple choices in the architecture firms they hire, the existence of a union could lead some to look elsewhere. A higher baseline pay and formalized overtime compensation for employees would possibly require firms to charge more for their services, and in theory, make them less competitive with firms who can afford to charge less. Whether this is a valid concern is hard to prove, but the architecture industry has historically competed for projects by undercutting fees and pushing more hours on its workers. “Your profit margin is based on the amount of overtime your employees work,” one member of the organizing committee at Snøhetta said. “It’s a one-to-one ratio.”
But the push for unionization did not stop with the end of the campaign at SHoP. The abandoned effort was covered across the design press and mainstream media. AWU began hearing from more firms interested in organizing. IAMAW formally hired Daley to work as an organizer focused specifically on architecture and related fields.
“On the one hand, yeah, you can label it a failure,” Daley says. “The way I like to look at it is it opened up this conversation. It opened the door. But it didn’t just open it—it blew it off the hinges.”
It did not take long for the topic of unions to come up when Siqueira set out to find a new job in the architecture industry. As one of the key organizers at SHoP before she was laid off, and after having her photo published in the New York Times article on the union push, her pro-union stance was not a secret when she began conversations with Bernheimer Architecture about taking a role at the firm.
“I didn’t want to be the one to bring up unionizing, but even in my second interview they were already asking me about my [unionizing] experience at SHoP,” she says. People at the firm, it turned out, were union-curious.
After being hired in early 2022, that curiosity quickly turned into organization, with the help of AWU. “Once we had that initial conversation with maybe five or six people, each of us reached out to one or two people, and suddenly we had 90% support of starting a union at Bernheimer,” Siqueira says.
Andrew Bernheimer, the firm’s founder, knew that workers at his firm were involved in the Architecture Lobby, and he also knew that Siqueira played a prominent role in the union push at SHoP. “I was not naive about what it meant for the likelihood of unionization at my practice,” he says.
So when a 16-person group went to him in June 2022 with a petition to hold a union vote, his first reaction was to learn more about what it would actually mean for his firm and his workers. “I’d read enough about labor organizing at places like Amazon or Starbucks or even other smaller places. But reading stories about it in the newspaper doesn’t really mean you understand the machinery of labor organizing,” he says. “As a business owner, there is definitely an overcurrent that unions are bad for businesses. I fundamentally didn’t believe that before the organization.”
Bernheimer maintains that relations between management and staff have always been strong at his firm. When the union talks began, he was far from antagonistic. In their own organizing meetings, the group sought “to make sure that the way we approached Andy was in the most positive way possible,” Siqueira says. “Whenever we talked about Andy, it was like ‘Andy’s so great, we love Andy, we just want to make sure Andy’s okay.’”
After looking into what unionization could mean for his firm and its business, Bernheimer believed he would be okay. In the fall of 2022, he voluntarily recognized the union without it being put to a formal vote through the National Labor Relations Board. “My understanding is that, as a service profession, we are hired for our talent, we are hired for our expertise, we are probably also hired relative to our cost,” he says. “I have confidence that any unionization effort wouldn’t affect any of those factors to the point that we would stop getting work.”
Soon after Bernheimer’s recognition of the union, negotiations got underway. A bargaining committee was elected, and a bargaining survey was distributed to better understand what the 16 bargaining unit members and the six members of management wanted to achieve. Priorities were set on paper, and AWU and the IAMAW facilitated training sessions to help the firm understand the process of bargaining, negotiating, and writing a contract.
Bargaining sessions have been underway for the past few months. Daley and Bernheimer characterize them as cordial and productive. Bernheimer cautions that he can’t say how unionization would work at smaller or larger firms than his, but that the overall goals of the union at his firm seem to be mutually beneficial. “The near-term benefits are a healthy workplace, happy architects, good work,” he says. He’s also seen a bump in interest from job seekers.
The downsides, if there are any, have not yet emerged, according to Bernheimer. Lost business, the fear cited by many businesses opposing unionization, has not occurred. “I haven’t had any clients offer anything other than congratulations or interest in what we’re doing,” Bernheimer says. “I have had no clients ask me why the hell we’re doing this.”
Bargaining sessions will continue over the summer. Both Bernheimer and AWU expect a contract to be finalized around Labor Day. Other workers and firms will be paying close attention. “Their contract is going to set the standard for the industry, because it’s going to be the only contract that there is,” Daley says.
The success of the union effort at Bernheimer Architecture is one major hurdle surpassed for AWU. Daley says that up until now the lack of a successful union has served almost as an excuse for the industry to avoid thinking about unions seriously, just like they might shy away from using a new building material or commissioning an unconventional design.
“In general, everyone is afraid of the unknown,” he says. “If there is not a clear precedent or example for something, things feel scary. I think that was the case with a lot of clients I used to work with.”
Interest in unionization has been growing. Daley says AWU is currently working with about a dozen active unionization campaigns in various stages of maturity. Even without succeeding, the Snøhetta campaign has contributed to that growth.
“Within three weeks of Snøhetta announcing their union push, five different campaigns reached out,” Daley says.
These ongoing efforts are in firms small and large, in places ranging from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Portland to Oklahoma, and in companies focusing on architecture, urban planning, interior design, and landscape architecture. Daley says the diversity of office types and backgrounds seeking to organize underscores the latent demand for different ways of running architecture and design businesses. “That makes me really excited about this, because what it says is these issues that people are talking about are systemic within the industry and they need to change,” Daley says.
The failure of the Snøhetta campaign may be a deterrent to other workers at big firms hoping to form unions.
Two members of the Snøhetta bargaining unit, who requested their names not be used, say the failure of their effort is not the death of this movement. They are hopeful that the other active campaigns will dig in and double-down their own efforts. Formalizing good practices can help other firms move away from the exploitative overwork, underpayment, and low project bidding practices that the industry struggles with. They also suggest that there is educational value in the mere fact that this campaign has garnered so much attention within and beyond the firm. “Awareness is very valuable,” one said.
The work of AWU continues. Daley, an architect-turned-organizer, is plenty busy, working full-time with architects and designers to try to carve new paths for themselves, their colleagues, and their industry. He says he’s still pursuing some design work on a personal basis, but is mostly glad to have transitioned out of architecture. “I don’t miss the late nights,” says Daley. “I don’t miss the impossible deadlines. I don’t miss the stress of it.”
His new job, which essentially did not exist more than two years ago, does still keep him with one foot in the world of architecture, though. He may not be designing buildings anymore, but he is helping reshape the industry. “I never imagined this would be the case, but I feel more connected to the industry now doing this work than I ever have before,” he says.
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