Above photo: With 90 percent support from workers, Bernheimer Architecture’s union won voluntary recognition. Tetra Images / Getty Images.
This summer, workers at Bernheimer Architecture in New York City became the first private sector architects in the US to ratify a union contract.
An architect at the firm explains their road to a first collective bargaining agreement.
The first attempt to unionize a privately owned architecture firm since the 1970s started at SHoP Architects in New York City, where I was working at the time. This was part of a wave of nontraditional organizing efforts taking place around 2020 that included tech workers at Kickstarter and Google, baristas at various Starbucks locations, writers at Vice, and partners at Apple stores, just to name a few.
During the summer of that same year, while most “nonessential workers” were working remotely under stay-at-home orders, some of us hit the streets of cities all over the country to protest police brutality and the assassinations of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Several workers at SHoP Architects participated in those marches and brought that energy back to the office. We were told to keep conversations on related topics off of SHoP’s platforms, so those discussions spread via Zoom meetings with obscure titles and external chat apps.
At first, these communication tools allowed us and our coworkers to grieve the injustices happening outside of our office. But soon our conversations turned inward, toward what was going on at our own workplace. Since so much our lives took place there — sixty to seventy hours per week was fairly standard — many of us felt that our workplace needed to reflect our moral values.
A question circulating around various workplaces at the time, including ours, was how to diversify our workforce. When we started pitching diversity-related office-wide initiatives to management, we were met with a pat on the back and nothing else. At the end of the summer, after many virtual all-office town halls led by management, we learned that our ideas as employees had been ignored, and management instead just chose to continue donating to a couple of universities (alma maters of some of the higher-ups) and a local youth-empowering nonprofit organization.
They brushed off all the proposals we had brought forward, including those dealing with serious issues that needed to be addressed prior to any diversification: complaints about anti-Asian and anti–Asian American discrimination within the office (HR and the office’s internal legal counsel dismissed the complaints, as those bringing them forward had no grounds for a legal case). They also dismissed our ideas for hiring from historically black colleges and universities because “these new hires would require more mentoring.” They dismissed our calls for more transparency in the decision-making process for things that affected employees, including how we were assigned to projects and teams, wages, promotions, salary increases, and so on. And even though they diversified the office’s advisory committee — a worker-led group that advocated for better working conditions within the firm — by adding myself and another colleague, they shut the committee down just a few weeks after I joined.
Management’s lack of respect for our concerns became fuel for our union campaign. Though that SHoP effort did not succeed, it planted the seeds of the first union victory at a private sector architecture firm in the United States, at my next employer, Bernheimer Architecture, in 2022. We recently ratified our first contract in July of this year.
Architects Are Workers
Since architecture’s beginnings as a profession, Hollywood and architectural higher education have portrayed it in similar ways: both imagine lone artists — typically white and male — singlehandedly creating beautifully built masterpieces. In his article “Are Architects Human?” architect Roy Weber argued that “the patriarchal structure of the atelier system, embedded in architectural education, has helped shield the architectural office from unionization and erected artificial distinctions between drafting labor and other forms of technical work.” He asked whether “the atelier, the charrette, [and] the cocktail parties with the boss” had left architects uninterested in fighting for better working conditions — having come to see themselves as rarefied artists who didn’t need something as plebeian as collective action.
In the workplace, however, the lone artist concept is far from reality. Those architects who own a firm and work on very small projects might resemble that caricature. But the majority of us are employed by medium to large firms, tackling large projects run by similarly large teams. An architectural firm may have one name or a few initials on its front door, but most of the work is done by a group of workers.
And we do this work in exchange for a wage, not just to fulfill our creative ambitions or feed our souls. Though some architects may aspire to become sole practitioners, most of us will work for an employer for the entirety of our careers. Education is lengthy and expensive, and licensing exams may take years. These conditions inevitably tie us to our workplace, as they tie millions of other workers to theirs.
Until last year, architecture was one of the few remaining nonunionized professions in the United States. In the 1930s, the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians (FAECT) was formed by architects as a reaction to the American Institute of Architects publicly suggesting very low minimum-wage standards under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Active for nearly fifteen years as part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the union saw its membership grow very quickly from its formation into the thousands.
In 1946, the FAECT merged into the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA), which had many left-wing members. The union was eventually hobbled thanks in large part to the anti-communist provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, which led the CIO to expel the UOPWA when the union’s leaders refused to sign affidavits swearing that they were not communists.
As in the Depression era, grievances from architects today still revolve around low wages. It wasn’t until recently, for example, that architecture internships were required to be remunerated in the United States. Even now, however, the actual wage can be determined by the employer, and since a majority of young workers work an exorbitant number of hours, their pay often turns out to be lower than minimum wage.
Besides low wages, firms economize on costs by laying off more experienced workers, allowing them to make profitable use of the constant flow of cheap and very eager labor. The competition is fierce for those who have been practicing for ten to fifteen years or more.
Organizing Efforts In Architecture Today
In 2020, getting the first campaign at SHoP off the ground had its challenges. Since we were organizing a nonunion profession, many workers had little familiarity with unions, and union organizers were in turn unfamiliar with the architectural profession. That unfamiliarity, coupled with workers’ general tendency toward overidentification with their bosses, meant we were on an uphill journey of having to convince our colleagues that they were indeed exploited workers, who needed protections just like any other workers earning a wage.
Fast-forward a few months into the campaign I was helping to lead, in mid-December 2021, two weeks before we went public, I was laid off from my job at SHoP. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to attend emotionally charged captive audience meetings or dodge management’s evil stares in meetings, at the office kitchen, in or hallways. Less fortunately, I still had unused maternity leave that I was planning to use in the upcoming months and definitely did not see any of that reflected in the one month of severance pay SHoP gave me. In January 2022, one month into management’s expensive union-busting campaign, SHoP workers pulled the union petition and canceled the election.
The short-lived effort at SHoP had its bright side, though: the firm, we workers — especially the ones who exposed themselves as organizers, as I did — and the architectural profession broadly wouldn’t be the same. Prior to that campaign, conversations about issues in the profession had been rare. Now these complaint sessions were starting to land on concrete solutions, and unionizing was starting to be considered as a viable tool, at SHoP and elsewhere. Having the word “union” next to the name of a “Starchitect” in news headlines alone was a big win.
During my second interview at Bernheimer Architecture, one of the first few questions asked was about my experience with the campaign. My eyes glittered with happy tears during that interview, sensing that management was open to unionization.
A few months into the new job, casual conversations led to discussions about unionizing. After a few of those informal conversations, I suggested a group meeting with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) staff organizer who worked with us during the SHoP campaign. Two weeks after that initial meeting, we had 90 percent worker support. Two to three months later, we received our voluntary recognition from our boss.
Getting To A Contract
The process toward voluntary recognition wasn’t without its compromises. At first, we had the entire office as part of the unit, leaving principal Andy Bernheimer as the sole person in management. Even though a majority of management participated excitedly in the efforts to organize and were essential in our initial conversations, and they effectively had no hiring or firing power, Andy was adamant that they be removed from the bargaining unit. It was only when we agreed to that stipulation that we got our recognition without an election.
When negotiations began, both management and the unit agreed to pursue a collaborative method of negotiations mediated by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service called “collaborative-based bargaining.” With their assistance, we brainstormed our way through many of the issues the bargaining unit wanted to address alongside management. On some issues involving economics, we engaged in traditional bargaining.
We made some gains on that front, but economics were not the sole focus of our bargaining unit. We focused on and won a number of demands that improved our working conditions and our quality of life. These included a thirty-six-hour workweek, which can be worked in four days so long as it doesn’t impact an employee’s work or team negatively; compensating time off for more than thirty-six hours a week, with overtime pay kicking in after forty-five hours (a very significant win); and maintaining our ability to work remotely with certain caveats.
Organizing The Sector
Although we only recently ratified our contract, we started seeing improvements in the office immediately after recognition. For one, we quickly formed a labor-management committee and from the outset started addressing issues that either weren’t going to be bargained over or needed more immediate attention, such as instituting a temporary paid family leave policy until the formal policy in our new contract went into effect; improving access to architectural examination study materials; and improving office maintenance and upkeep, among others. Now, with a contract in hand, I see my colleagues navigating the workplace with a sense of confidence that I hadn’t seen before.
We want our contract to be distributed widely beyond our office, too. We have already shared it with our fellow workers at Sage and Coombe Architects — the second architecture firm in New York City to voluntarily recognized its employees’ union — as they’re currently in negotiations for their first contract. We’re also sharing it with our umbrella advocacy organization, Architectural Workers United, so that other workers in the profession who are looking to organize have concrete examples of policies they can fight for. And as our numbers grow, we want to start the first dedicated local for unionized architects, representing all architectural workers in New York City.
More broadly, our goal with this first contract is to make strides toward legislative changes that prioritize unionized labor in publicly funded architectural projects and potentially bring architects under Project Labor Agreements, which are already common within the construction industry. We also would like to build on some now-dormant legacies of our historical predecessor, the FAECT. The FAECT advocated for progressive housing policy, created educational programs that extended formal architectural education to those who could otherwise not afford it, and also sought to assist members in preparing for licensing and in keeping up with technological advances.
Four years after the first failed attempt at SHoP and two years after the breakthrough at Bernheimer Architects, I’m hopeful the union movement in architecture is just getting started.