Previously on Archinect: Protesting Architectural Assistants in the UK are Fed Up: Is the Architectural Education System at Fault?

Over recent months, a conversation about unpaid overtime has risen to the top of the United Kingdom’s architectural discourse, spurred by lobbying from the Future Architects Front. We took a closer look at how the latest debate began, what it uncovered about the prevalence of unpaid overtime in architecture, and what it means for the future of unpaid overtime in the UK and abroad. 

In June 1968, civil rights leader Whitney Young Jr. took to the stage of the AIA Annual Convention in Portland, Oregon, chastising the profession for its silence during the turmoil of America’s civil rights movement. “You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights, and I am sure this has not come to you as any shock,” he said. “You are most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance.”

Over 50 years later, in January 2021, Young’s words were resurrected in an open letter to the AIA’s British equivalent, the RIBA, sent on behalf of architectural students, graduates, and junior employees across the United Kingdom, detailing their lack of faith in the current state of professional practice. Accompanying the letter’s demands were a collection of over 100 personal stories from the signatories. “People say they care about mental health and they want to tackle the stigma, then cause your poor mental health and tell you it’s perfectly normal at your stage,” says one. “In a period of 3–4 months at one design practice, I worked over 200 hours of unpaid overtime,” says another. One signatory, whose experience of low salaries, unpaid overtime, and a threat of redundancy caused stress-related weight loss, concluded “it’s making me not want to go into practice if this is the reality of being an architect.”

To dub the letter “confessions of an architecture graduate” seems wrong. “Confession” implies guilt, or atonement for wrongdoing. Instead, these are the raw testimonials of passionate people who, in their early years of professional practice, feel disenfranchised at best, or exploited at worst. To the Future Architects Front (FAF), the group that organized the letter, these stories are the driving force behind a campaign to end the exploitation of future architects. “It started out of necessity more than anything else,” says Charlie Edmonds, a co-founder of FAF. Speaking to Archinect about the movement, Edmonds cites a “slew of problems and dysfunctional aspects of the pathway to qualification, and employment in general” — everything from salaries and prior-experience mandates to RIBA resources and representation, which fueled both the letter and the demands within it.

While FAF’s letter and campaign touched on a variety of issues, the specific topic of unpaid overtime resonated widely in subsequent media commentaries and analyses. When asked why this may have been the case, Edmonds points to the uniquely tangible, measurable, and common contradictions raised by the phenomenon of unpaid overtime. “Accountability, resources, the pathway to qualification — these are institutional, multifaceted discussions,” he says. “Unpaid overtime, for a lot of people, can be reduced to a simple idea — I think I should be paid for my work.”

The industry is not only financially reliant on unpaid overtime; in its current form, it is existentially reliant on it.

A subsequent investigation by the Architects' Journal (AJ) laid bare the prevalence of unpaid overtime across UK practices. Of the 530 architectural assistants surveyed by the AJ, 88% said they are never paid overtime, with many adding that once overtime was factored in, their salaries dipped “well below the minimum wage.” One in five architectural assistants stated they continually worked more than 10 hours of overtime every week, while half have never been offered time in lieu. To clarify for readers unfamiliar with the UK’s architectural education system, an “architectural assistant” is an employee of a practice who has completed their Bachelors or Masters degrees in architecture, often within the past few years but has not yet undertaken a final professional diploma to be legally recognized as an architect.

“I think it’s fair to say that the industry is already under pressure: long hours, low fees, a steady reduction in agency,” says Chris Hildrey, director of London-based Hildrey Studio and author of acclaimed research into unpaid overtime in recent years. “But it’s important to remember that this is what we find after the productive capabilities of the profession have already been artificially inflated with the output of literally millions of hours of free labor every year. It is not only financially reliant on unpaid overtime, in its current form it is existentially reliant on it. Our entire approach to practice needs to adapt if the symptom of unpaid overtime is to be addressed.”

Curious about whether architecture's dependence on unpaid overtime is unique, we asked Hildrey how his statistics for the architectural industry measured against other sectors. His findings were resounding. “At the time of my research in 2012, I analyzed 5 years of national statistics,” he says. “I found that — across all professions in the UK — the average amount of overtime worked was 2.6 hours per person per week. For architects, this was 350% higher at 9.25 hours of overtime per person per week — around 20% of all hours worked. In all, 15% of all hours worked in architecture in the UK were unpaid.”

The industry-wide dependency on unpaid overtime is also not confined to the UK. For Maya Porath, National Organizer of The Architecture Lobby, the problem is systemic across the United States as well. “The financial viability of architecture, particularly as a creative design profession, is predicated on unpaid overtime,” she told Archinect. “While seldom explicitly stipulated, unpaid overtime is the de facto condition of employment for many in the field, to the point that it is considered standard. The routine extraction of more than 40 hours of labor a week from architectural workers, particularly junior and intermediate level employees, is the underpinning of both the creative process in the field and the fee structures the profession operates under.”

... across all professions in the UK — the average amount of overtime worked was 2.6 hours per person per week. For architects, this was 350% higher at 9.25 hours of overtime per person per week

Firms that defend the practice of unpaid overtime often point to the difficulty of accurately predicting a project’s resourcing and profit margins from the beginning. Firms bidding for a new commission often begin, before any major concepts or investigations are undertaken, with a fee proposal that leaves little room for project overruns, redesigns, or other “known unknowns.” In the interests of remaining competitive, allowances are seldom given for extra resourcing and overtime; money which can be the difference between a firm making a profit or a loss on the project. In response to these points, FAF co-founder Edmonds asks why younger staff should pay the price for the failures of previous generations who have overseen a gradual decline in the profession’s value. “It’s a pretty cynical approach that the first people to suffer as a result of cost-cutting are junior employees,” he says. “The responsibility to make up for lost value is being put onto young people who had no part in devaluing the profession in the first place.”

Architect and director Hildrey is equally critical: “It makes those with the least agency suffer for the failings of those with the most. When unpaid overtime becomes an expectation rather than an exception, we need to acknowledge the structural failure at hand and work to address the root causes. Unless we do this, the underlying problems will only continue. If you regularly require staff to work overtime and can’t handle the financial commitment of paying them for it, I’d suggest that you may not have had a successful business in the first place.”

If RIBA start to work as actual leaders in terms of what the profession should be, they could make being a chartered practice mean something.

There are early signs that FAF’s open letter may pay off. After receiving the letter, the RIBA engaged in discussions with FAF, resulting in a series of proposed changes by the institute. Chief among the proposals is a ban on unpaid overtime among the RIBA’s 28,000 members. While representing a step forward, it is important to note that such changes are not imminent — before becoming official RIBA policy, the plans will be scoped, consulted upon, and will require final approval from the RIBA Board.

Nevertheless, the move has been broadly welcomed by architects across the UK, including Hildrey. “I’m delighted to see FAF giving a voice to the many people facing this issue and pleased to see the RIBA respond positively,” he says. “However, tackling the issue by simply adding more detailed requirements to chartered practice guidance is simply treating the symptoms rather than addressing the systemic problems that caused them in the first place.” Among the positive reactions, some observers have pointed out that firms who wish to continue unpaid overtime may simply refuse to join RIBA if the new changes are enacted. Indeed, RIBA membership is not compulsory for UK architects, and the institute is already seen by some as not being relevant or beneficial for everyday architects.

While acknowledging the possibility that some practices may end their RIBA membership to escape the changes, FAF’s Edmonds sees the changes as a way of increasing RIBA’s relevance. “My hope is that if RIBA start to work as actual leaders in terms of what the profession should be, they could make being a chartered practice mean something; a practice that conducts itself to a higher level. If RIBA considered labor issues more strongly, not only would they find that their membership is more engaged, but they would also more effectively live up to their mission as a voice of the profession.” Hildrey, meanwhile, sees the potential ban as an opportunity to more closely examine how architects work day-to-day. “I think it would help the profession recalibrate to the constraints and opportunities of today,” he says. “Practices might value curatorial judgement over endless options; better workflows would become a priority, last-minute revisions would be thought about more carefully, and the skills that each practice holds may be employed in more diverse and innovative ways.”

In the most interconnected era of human history, we see countless examples of local events triggering global responses.

In a digital age, where ideas do not obey borders, national movements such as FAF in the United Kingdom have the potential to spark international change. “We have a lot of interaction with the rest of Europe,” says Edmonds. “We’ve spoken to people from Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Italy; there are many shared institutional problems across all countries.” In the most interconnected era of human history, we see countless examples of local events triggering global responses — such as the global anti-racism protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, or the global environmental discourse driven by Greta Thunberg’s solitary stance outside the Swedish parliament.

In the United States, The Architecture Lobby were early endorsees of FAF’s campaign. The Lobby’s National Organizer Maya Porath echoes the stance taken in countries across the Atlantic. “In the US, salaried architectural workers are often classified as 'learned professional employees' and are legally exempt from overtime pay. This isn’t unique to the field but a result of the systemic capitalist model of extracting free or low-paid labor for the profit of a few,” says Porath. “Unpaid labor — unpaid internships, freelancing without benefits, and unpaid overtime — all result in exploitation and create barriers to enter into the profession, especially for those who cannot afford to support themselves without a paycheck. The Architecture Lobby advocates for restructuring our workplaces to be more equitable either by building alternative models of ownership such as cooperatives, or building collective worker power towards unionizing. As long as our profession continues to tolerate abusive labor practices in the office and on the construction site, including unpaid overtime, it cannot be a force for good in society.”

This generation is setting a higher standard for what they should expect from their bosses, their institutions, and their profession. 

Time will judge how ultimately successful the latest movement to improve labor conditions in architecture will be. Throughout the discourse on unpaid overtime, the stories in FAF’s open letter, and our conversations with Edmonds, Hildrey, and Porath, it is clear that unpaid overtime is one symptom of larger, systemic, deep-rooted flaws within the profession; encompassing issues of value, power imbalances, and workflows. Even the early moves proposed by RIBA, or similar reforms from their international equivalents, may take years or decades to wholly reform the environment in which architects, junior and senior, build their careers.

For reference, we can return to Young’s 1968 speech to the AIA Convention in Portland, chastising the lack of diversity within the profession. In response to Young’s speech, the AIA set in motion several actions to enhance diversity within the profession, such as banning discrimination based on race, sex, creed, or national origin in 1970. Fifty years later, African Americans still make up only 2% of all NCARB-licensed architects, despite making up 14% of the general American population. A movement to improve labor conditions in architecture will be forced to navigate similar obstacles, using industry-specific levers to feed a wider interdependent struggle by workers — one which will undoubtedly see false starts, slow change, and powerful opposition.

FAF’s campaign, and the stories fueling it, have nonetheless struck a powerful chord within the UK’s architectural discourse; giving a voice to deep-rooted, widely-held, multifaceted frustrations among the next generation of architects. This generation is setting a higher standard for what they should expect from their bosses, their institutions, and their profession. To Edmonds and FAF, this is more than just a higher standard, but a bottom line — “you should get paid for the work that you do.”