In 2023, architects and other staff at Snohetta, a prominent New York firm, tried — and failed — to form a union. Now the country’s top labor regulator has formally accused the firm of breaking the law by laying off employees who backed the effort.
In a complaint issued on Friday, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board accused Snohetta of illegally dismissing eight employees because they supported the union and “engaged in concerted activities” — that is, collective action — “and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.”
The complaint also accused the firm of having “interrogated employees about their union sympathies or activities.” Employees are supposed to be able to keep their preferences private, and union elections are held by secret ballot.
Elaine Molinar, a partner at the firm, said in an email, “All decisions regarding the work force reduction were driven by business considerations that started long before the unionization effort.” She added that the firm did not know the union preferences of individual employees in a large majority of instances.
The case comes amid a recent burst in union organizing in fields not traditionally associated with organized labor: tech workers, magazine journalists, doctors and pharmacists. Many see unions as a way to address a sense of lost autonomy and control, skimpy compensation or conflicts with management over the direction of their companies.
For architects, the impetus to unionize has generally been low pay and long hours that often include uncompensated overtime. Architects at prominent firms typically earn significantly less than other professionals with similar educational requirements and student debt, like lawyers at top law firms. They complain that their employers often suggest that professional prestige and the importance of their mission should suffice to offset the shortfall.
Those in the profession who oppose unionization typically say clients simply are not willing to spend substantially more on projects to improve compensation for architects. They often predict that nonunion firms would undercut the fees of firms that unionized.
Several former employees at Snohetta, which was founded in 2004 by architects from a Norwegian firm of the same name and has designed or helped design a number of high–profile New York spaces, said frustrations over pay motivated their union campaign.
Many Snohetta employees assumed that the firm would be open to a union because it had a reputation for being progressive and worker friendly. Union membership is relatively common in Norway, where Snohetta originated, and the New York firm had for years held regular meetings in which two worker representatives would sit down with management to discuss issues of concern to employees.
But the former employees said the union campaign, in which they sought to affiliate with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, had created tension after they approached management for voluntary recognition in early 2023, and especially after employees filed for a union election that May.
Several former employees said senior managers at the company, known as directors, had told employees they worried that a union would change the company’s culture and hurt its business prospects. The employees said directors had discussed the union with them in an apparent attempt to gauge their voting intentions, an accusation the labor board complaint echoed.
In late July 2023, a few weeks after the union lost the election by a vote of 35 to 29, Snohetta’s leaders held a meeting in which they announced that the firm’s financial condition had worsened and that they would probably need to lay off employees. When the company announced layoffs the next week, all eight people let go were union supporters.
Proving that an employer has ousted workers in retaliation for seeking to unionize can be difficult, but in this case internal correspondence that was made accessible to Snohetta employees, apparently inadvertently, appeared to shed light on the motivation.
In an email exchange on June 13, 2023, the day before the union vote, a group of managers discussed a list that classified employees as union supporters, union opponents or undecided. Seven of the laid-off employees appeared on the list as union supporters, and the eighth was listed as undecided.
Then emails sent after the election indicated a desire to oust union supporters. One email written by a director said: “Now it’s up to me to design some prophylaxis against any such future efforts,” apparently alluding to a union campaign.
A second email written by the same director expressed concern about having a “unionist in the IT position” and said that, “to my mind, trust in this role is essential.”
Ms. Molinar, the Snohetta partner, said the employee alluded to in this email had not, in fact, been considered for the work force reduction or let go by the company. She pointed out that neither the union nor the employees had sought to overturn the election results on the grounds that the company had acted illegally.
William Haller, a lawyer for the union, said in an email that the union did not yet have evidence of misconduct before the July 2023 deadline to file an election challenge. But he wrote in an October 2023 letter to the labor board that, in 32 years as a labor lawyer, he had “never seen such glaring evidence of blatant antiunion animus.”
The case will be litigated before a labor board judge unless it is settled beforehand, and the company can appeal an adverse ruling to the national labor board in Washington.
Efforts to unionize other architecture firms have had mixed results. At the New York-based firm SHoP, employees withdrew a union-election filing in 2022. A smaller firm, Bernheimer Architecture, became the first private-sector architecture firm in the United States to unionize in decades when it voluntarily recognized a union later in 2022.
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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