Workers at Snøhetta’s U.S. studios are filing to form a union. In an Instagram post published by Architectural Workers United, the group said “We, the employees of Snøhetta’s U.S. studios, have filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election.”
“We are architects, landscape architects, designers, and operations staff who care deeply for Snøhetta, our projects, and the collaborative culture that makes our firm unique,” the statement continues. “We are proud of our work at Snøhetta and we are committed to our studio’s success. Through unionization, we will gain a collective voice in the future of our workplace and our profession.”
“We are excited to take this next step together,” the statement concludes.
The group is seeking to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the union group associated with the movement among ShoP workers to form a union towards the end of 2021.
Snøhetta has approximately 90 employees across New York and San Francisco, as well as employees in Oslo, Norway who are already unionized. According to an article on Curbed which broke the story, the workers at Snøhetta were motivated to unionize not because of workplace conditions like those that triggered the SHoP movement, but to lock in their working conditions.
“It’s an extremely good place to work,” Snøhetta employee Andrew Anderson told Curbed. “To the question of ‘Why organize here?’, the answer is ‘Because we can.’”
Also speaking to Curbed, Snøhetta’s management said: “Snøhetta in the U.S. supports our employees’ right to seek self-determination. We look forward to working with this group to better understand what joining a union might mean for the firm, our culture, our business, and our entire team.”
If successful in their unionization attempt, Snøhetta would become the second architecture firm in the United States to hold a unionized workforce, after workers at Bernheimer Architecture formed a union in September 2022.
You can learn more about the story of the union movement in architecture through our in-depth feature article on the subject here, or by following our rolling news coverage of the topic here.
13 Comments
So it begins (or rather continues)...
As a practice with Scandinavian roots and an office in Europe, Snohetta is better prepared than most to operate a unionized office in the US.
Too many 'murican firm owners struggle to understand the difference between a 1099 and a w2. A unionized workforce would break a lot of peoples' current business and/or management models.
the good kind of breaking
we dont need unions, we need architecture school to teach architecture, code, zoning and business in lieu of the crap they teach now.
Hard disagree on that. It's easy to learn how to do that boring stuff on the job. It's impossible to learn how to think correctly about architecture on the job.
I think we need architecture school to teach the boring stuff as well as the cutting edge stuff (for example, no other professional education behooves you to learn 90% on the job. Imagine a doctor trying to give experimental medication to a client - bad example i know)
But since this convo is about unionization, I think schools need to teach the boring stuff AND we need to unionize
my school taught mostly cool stuff, some boring stuff, and nothing about unionization. the boring stuff though shouldn't include zoning.. it doesn't make sense to learn much about zoning when it's very particular to your locality.
however, codes, detailing, design, and what it means to be a worker are all universal, the latter much more so than learning what it means to be an owner, which is preached like gospel in school.
And the people teaching at the schools should unionize too!
Most of the educators have pretty cushy jobs and almost none of them work overtime, like the kids they feed to the system do.
Are you joking? Most educators I know are in extremely tenuous positions working as part-time or adjuncts, getting paid by the class with 0 guarantee they will be brought back the next semester.
tell me you know nothing about academic exploitation without telling me... i mean sure there are a few nice tenured position, but most university depend on precarious adjunct labor and pauperism for grad students
As with Shop, the participation of the international contingent is key. If visa holders are wary of joining the effort in fear that employers may withdraw H1B and GC sponsorship, there may well be a two-tier system for American employees and their foreign colleagues - with the latter bearing the brunt of the extra workload shed by the former.
this is a little bit of a straw-man - each workplace has the ability to bargain over their own contracts, visa work is something that has to be negotiated over and could in theory be protected. but you're right in that the "fear" up front is real and will be used against them, even if false.
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