TAL May ‘26 Newsletter

No Stamps! No Camps! 🙅‍♀️🧊Anti Carceral Organizing, a TAL member survey ✍️ and reflections on Jane McAlevey’s “No Shortcuts” 🚫

Dear Architectural Workers,

Some updates on recent and upcoming projects that members are working on that we hope you can join us on!

But first! We’d like to thank Reiner de Graaf for his remarks on unionization as expressed in his recent book “Architecture Against Architecture”. It’s great to see a figure at the height of prestige in our profession, acknowledging that there’s a deep institutional rot and general crisis in our field. Typically elite firm owners and intellectuals in architecture subscribe to magical thinking about the ineffable power of architecture to shape the world, while treating workers as mere tools; extensions of their glowing auteurial minds, detached from any economic concerns or lived conditions.

For this reason, we usually consider our struggle to be a fight from below, but hey, if Reiner is sympathetic management, we’ll hear him out. If he is serious about addressing these issues, we hope he stands back if OMA’s workers were to organize their respective offices and demand an overhaul of the firm’s notorious culture of overwork, and to pull away from their sometimes controversial oligarch clientele.

Now we understand it may be difficult to do all this and go against the business model that’s driven OMA’s success. OMA has always attempted to have it’s cake and eat it too, in terms of maintaining a critical intellectual position while also pursuing the elite starchitecture it’s built its reputation on. Today that contradiction is finally coming apart at the seams. It has been years since OMA has been considered a paragon of how to run an architecture firm, but the talented workers there deserve decent working conditions just like everyone else.

Fortunately there are tangible and rather anodyne changes that OMA could make. They will require courage and some risk taking, however with the downward slide of our profession, architectural workers have nothing to lose but their chains.

In solidarity,

TAL

TAL Member Survey

Fill out the Member Survey!

Make your voice heard. What unites us in building collective worker power across diverse firms, project types, and community contexts? We want to hear from you about your labor conditions, issues you care about, and challenges you face.

The Architecture Lobby is a worker-run labor organization. Our campaigns are only as effective as they root in the experience and needs of our members. Your survey responses inform TAL’s priorities and future organizing campaigns.

No Stamps For Camps

We’d like to announce a new project we’re launching in collaboration with Design As Protest and Atelier Office titled “No Stamps For Camps.” This project is a collective effort to use architectural, engineering and planning methods to disrupt, stall, and halt construction on ICE facilities. We’re looking for people who have professional expertise re:code analysis to contribute to an initial project research phase. If you’re interested in getting involved, reach out to info@architecture-lobby.org.

Organize with Other TAL Members:

Join the Discord server to connect and coordinate with other nation-wide architectural workersr: Discord Sign-Up Here and reach out to info@architecture-lobby.org with any questions.

Organizing Committee (OC) meeting - Thursday, May14th @ 9:00pm EST.

Join event via Discord Here. All are welcome.

TAL Green New Deal (GND) Working Group - Every Monday 7:00pm EST

Architectural Workers organizing for a Just Transition in the Building Sector.

Call for Architectural Workers to Participate! Practice the fundamentals of workplace organizing conversations while supporting an emergent TAL project - Details Here - Email info@architecture-lobby.org to signup – please put “structure-test organizing conversations” in the subject line.

TAL Reading Group:

We have an upcoming reading group! Join via the link here!

Contribute to This Newsletter! This newsletter is by us for us. It is a space for leftist architectural workers to share writing, art and more on labor, politics, and architecture. Send us a pitch to info@architecture-lobby.org

Beyond TAL:

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing - Sign Up

A great place to kick-start the skillsets that are critical to agitating for a union in your workplace.

Call for Postcards “OUT-OF-MAP – Feminist narratives of public space” - Learn more Through the simple yet powerful format of a postcard, this collective project explores the emotional, relational, and political dimensions of everyday urban life in public space.

Direct Action & Mutual Aid:

Donate to anti-carceral de-arrest fund: Mid-West Immigration Bond Fund.

Add Jobsite anti-ICE Worker Protections to Your Drawings and Specs: Resources from Arch League of NYC.

Member Writing:

We want to publish writing by Lobby members. These pieces do not reflect the positions of the Architecture Lobby as an organization, however we hope to provide a space for discussion of architectural labor conditions and how to make change in our profession and the world. If you’re interested in contributing to our newsletter, please email us!

Reading Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts with The Architecture Lobby

Over the past few months, members participated in a TAL reading group to discuss Jane McAlevey’s dissertation-turned-book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Several participants had previously attended the “Skills to Win” workshop led by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, a program designed by the late McAlevey herself. If you are looking to level up your understanding of effective unionizing, McAlevey’s rigorous framework and her analysis of epic case studies in No Shortcuts is an good place to start.

Our initial conversations re: concepts such as “theories of power” would return to reflecting on our economic and cultural contexts. In architecture, a major obstacle to collective power is a lack of class consciousness, often obscured by a pedagogy of individualism. Architectural education socializes students into a lineage of elite practitioners and lone geniuses, a mindset that ultimately disempowers us. By adopting a posture of professional exceptionalism, we fail to recognize our status as workers. This culture extends from the competitive studio atmosphere to the hierarchical structure of the typical firm. To build meaningful power, we must first accept that we are employees as vulnerable to this anti-labor economy as those in any other trade or profession.

This realization allows us to interrogate the unexamined theories of power (or strategy for changemaking) that we were operating with and make critical distinctions between three processes for changemaking that McAlevey presents: advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing. While our profession is well-versed in advocacy (lobbying and policy promotion) and mobilizing (activating existing supporters, weekend protests), true organizing, according to McAlevey, is the arduous, long-term process of building power among the unorganized.

Advocacy concentrates power within a small circle of elites, typically lawyers, pollsters, researchers, and communications firms, who wage battles through litigation or “back-room” negotiations. This approach rarely alters fundamental power relations; instead, it reinforces existing dynamics, incurs heavy costs, and fails to leverage the numerical advantage of the masses. Today, many unions employ “New Labor” strategies that prioritize advocacy by outsourcing negotiations to legal professionals and often conceding the right to strike, a shift that effectively disempowers rank-and-file workers.

Mobilizing serves as a more recent mechanism for change, bringing larger numbers of people into the struggle through campaigns directed by professional staff or volunteer activists. In this model, “authentic messengers” represent the collective to the media and policymakers, even though the actual negotiations are often still handled by paid professionals (as opposed to workers). While mobilizing engages grassroots activists, it is overly reliant on social media, and it does not grow a constituency (participation is the prerequisite for power).

In contrast, organizing identifies and cultivates power within the inclusive collective of workers to win better living and working conditions. This model involves large numbers of people in mass, democratic negotiations and elevates “organic leaders, “influential workers who emerge from the workplace ecosystem itself, through intentional skills training. Organizing strategies include the supermajority strike, sustained nonviolent direct action, and the building of electoral majorities; within this framework, mobilizing is viewed merely as a tactic rather than a comprehensive strategy.

According to McAlevey’s research, effecting workplace change depends on the specific combination of approaches used. Her findings suggest that structure-based organizing is significantly more impactful than the “self-selecting” groups common in single-issue mobilization. McAlevey highlights institutions like the workplace and the Black church during Jim Crow as vital structures where organizing served as the primary driver for the labor and civil rights movements. Structures, according to McAlevey, a defined universe, such as a workplace, a tenement building, or a house of worship. People are in these structures because they work there or live there, not necessarily because they agree with a specific political cause. As presented in No Shortcuts, the empirical evidence suggests that structure-based organizing still offers the best opportunity to rebuild a powerful and enduring progressive movement for workers.

Moving beyond narrow negotiations for pay, we used McAlevey’s analyses of the Chicago Teachers Union and Make the Road New York to imagine a new model for the Architecture industry. This involves broadening our coalitions and community to connect workers from the job site to the office to the home. We also noted the efficacy of in-person organizing, prioritizing face-to-face engagement and shared meals to build solidarity through physical presence, rather than relying on digital media or closed-door negotiations. Through incremental actions, the goal of equitable decision-making power over workplace practices from project procurement to what types of software we use and defining professional roles, would only be established through organizing.

While we share struggles with other sectors, we face other types of hurdles that No Shortcuts does not address. We are mostly private-sector workers, not public employees who are battling with pro-corporation governance, and while our ranks include many immigrants and minorities, we do not typically face the immediate physical perils of industrial labor (although our comrades in building production - construction trades workers - absolutely do). However, we do share certain things in common with many workers across the US; the deprivation of our time outside of the office resulting in social injury, pay stagnation, competition among our peers for minimal professional development opportunities, and the insecurity of healthcare and housing in America, all create an environment of precarity.

Ultimately, we learn from McAlevey that there are no shortcuts to building collective worker power. It requires a commitment to the collective and deeply democratic, a shift in professional ideology, and a belief that ordinary architectural workers can effect radical change. A shared experience in our group, prior to thinking about organizing, was the transition from viewing workplace grievances as personal challenges to recognizing them as systemic conditions. There is a practical side to compassion that begins with oneself and extends to the belief that we are all deserving of dignity. If we want an alternative that is equitable and just, we can start by combatting the forces that deprive us of our time, have these conversations with each other (and with our coworkers), and be the ones committed to building it.

We’re looking forward to continuing our reading group going forward. Our next book will be CG Beck’s “The Labor of Architecture”. All are welcome to join!