Photo: Ike Edeani. Image courtesy Snøhetta.
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.
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