The Architecture Lobby is a founding participant in Architectural Workers International (AWI), a coalition of more than twenty architectural labor advocacy groups and unions organizing across borders, and we are committed to its call for internationalism from the bottom up. AWI took shape in 2025 out of relationships built through Organizing in the Lobby, TAL’s installation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where twenty-six worker organizations from around the world described their formation, their work, and their vision, and where local groups co-hosted the solidarity-building workshops that seeded the network’s first assembly. Initiated and coordinated by NAA! (Netherlands Angry Architects), AWI now connects nationally focused groups into shared infrastructure consisting of quarterly roundtables, knowledge sharing sessions, comparative research, and coordinated pressure campaigns. TAL believes the conditions we organize against are not national in origin. Overwork, wage suppression, discrimination, and the sector’s complicity in displacement and climate breakdown follow the same capital across borders, and they cannot be fought firm by firm or country by country. We are also demanding that international solidarity be built by rank-and-file workers rather than on our behalf, because the institutions that claim to speak for architecture globally have consistently spoken for its employers.
We are motivated by a simple recognition that architecture is a global profession and exploitation is global too, and committed to long-term collaboration with worker organizations across borders, sectors, and languages.