Sometimes Your Boss is the Best Organizer

Workers at the London office of Bjarke Ingels Group made headlines in February by protesting BIG’s decision to terminate up to 140 employees after the loss of a single project. Affected workers, many of whom had relocated on work visas sponsored by the firm, aligned themselves with the Section of Architectural Workers, or SAW (architects of all political stripes love three-letter acronyms). They are still fighting for union recognition in a renewed effort to redress the precarity and imbalance of power in our profession.

This action is part of a wave of organizing across creative and technical professions who are turning (or returning) to collective bargaining as our employment conditions and economic situations become more acute. Unionization efforts in architecture have seen a resurgence since SHoP Architects publicly crushed organizing efforts at the firm in 2022. SHoP retained union-busting law and PR firms to disrupt the campaign, forcing organizers to withdraw their efforts before they could hold a unionization election with the National Labor Relations Board. A similar unionization campaign was killed by Snøhetta in 2023, but one critical difference has put that struggle in recent headlines: their management wrote a series of incriminating emails about the illegal firing of union organizers. These emails were then leaked to the New York Times (if any managers, firm directors, or principals are reading this—please keep writing emails detailing your violations of labor law, and forward them to us!). The messages are extraordinary: an unnamed Snøhetta director calls for “loyalty” amongst employees, and characterizes firing eight people as “prophylaxis” against future attempts to unionize. Their carelessness in writing this down and allowing it to leak has led to the rare and exciting possibility of U.S. labor law being enforced. According to the New York Times, a regional director of the NLRB has formally accused Snøhetta of firing eight employees illegally—a claim seemingly substantiated by the emails.

It’s easy to feel at the mercy of our employers, locked into a one-sided power dynamic where fragile organizing campaigns are struck down left and right. But these union busting efforts conceal a deep anxiety and weakness behind management’s apparent strength. At the core of each incident is severe mismanagement: Snøhetta’s leaked emails, BIG’s flailing layoffs, and SHoP’s panicked intimidation techniques reveal real unpreparedness for collective bargaining. Recent events at YSoA have even demonstrated this in microcosm. Cuts to student jobs in 2023 led to a delegation meeting with Yale’s University Labor Relations Attorney, where it became clear that YSoA leadership could have consulted the University lawyer at any time, but failed to do so. Instead, they chose a “DIY” approach to federal labor law which resulted in a complete reversal of the job cuts, which were in violation of the graduate worker union’s contract.

Graduate workers’ victory at YSOA in 2024 is not unparalleled. Two New York offices (Bernheimer and Sage & Coombe) responded to organizing efforts by voluntarily recognizing their unions—choosing to honor the work and dignity of their employees in the process. While the inherent risks of unionization can be paralyzing and the fight is often uphill for workers, there is a world to be gained through organizing. Your boss may panic, fire people, take retribution, but they may also recognize that their workers deserve a voice.

The bottom line is that the technical, organizational, and communication skills we are hired for give us a decisive edge when it comes to unionization. Your boss, of course, has the power of the purse and an arsenal of anti-union measures at their disposal, but none of that guarantees even basic competence in this arena of legal and social combat. When principals, partners, and other managers underestimate their employees—or overestimate their own judgment—they create the conditions for successful unionization (or at least spectacular own-goal lawsuits). All we can do is continue to struggle towards recognition in our discipline, in the hope that our employers possess moral clarity, or failing that, a poor understanding of digital security.