Design And Trades Workers Are In It Together  

The building sector is broken. Despite decades of sustainability initiatives in the design professions, little progress has been made to reduce the building sector’s outsized contribution to climate change. We have waited for market forces to reorient the sector for us, but the market has failed. Now we need a worker-led just transition to shift from extractive to regenerative economies and reduce workers’ dependence on the exploitative construction industry.

Structural changes in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry at the scale needed require alliance between building trade and design workers. While there are only 120,000 licensed architects working in the United States, there are over 3 million skilled craft workers represented by North America’s Building Trade Unions (NABTU). 

Both design workers and the building trades have a stake in the fight for a just transition. Each day, construction workers across the country face life-threatening climate impacts on job sites, where conditions like extreme heat and flooding pose an immediate risk to workers’ health and safety.

This pamphlet draws on listening sessions with building trade workers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), United Association Plumbers Union (UA), and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBC). During the sessions, workers shared their thoughts about how their work relates to the climate crisis, what they’ve accomplished with their unions, and what they envision for a just transition. These conversations are a first step toward building a cross-sector coalition. 

Building trade and design workers, support each other in the fight for a just transition! 

What does a just transition for the building sector look like?

Even without a changing climate, the building industry is volatile. Workers bear the burden of the industry’s speculative building cycles. During busts, layoffs occur in architecture firms, while unionized building trade workers may have to accept non-union work or travel longer distances. Automation (including BIM software) has eliminated many design jobs and specialties, causing job insecurity and lowering wages. 

Not all green jobs are good jobs. Green jobs must respect the skills of workers. For instance, while large-scale solar panel installation is necessary for an energy transition, the work itself is repetitive, dull, and often takes place in remote locations under harsh environmental conditions. Electricians take pride in difficult technical work and creative conduit bending. A just transition for the building sector would create jobs that enable trained professionals to continue to apply their skills and expertise to fulfilling work. It would also provide protection for non-union migrant and visa workers, who are currently exploited to widen profit margins–even on sustainability-minded projects. 

Working separately, architects and building trade workers face a Catch-22 implementing sustainable building practices. At the job site, there is limited funding for training unless green building work is “in the pipeline.” At the drafting table, designers face resistance specifying high-performance details when there are not enough skilled trades workers to implement them. When these efforts are coordinated, building trade and design workers can organize against the bosses’ “race to the bottom” while building future-oriented skill sets.

Building trade and design workers, define the terms of a just transition for the sector together!

Organizing Together

Together, workers must advocate for adding climate to the agendas that shape union contracts, local legislation, and determine what gets built. Collective wins that we learned about in our conversations with building trade workers and labor organizers include:

• Green Ban; New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF); 1970s; Sydney, Australia: The BLF coordinated labor strikes across various construction sites owned by the same developers to prevent development that would destroy green spaces and residential areas. They pioneered environmental urbanism and exercised refusal, stating, 

“Yes, we want to build. However, we prefer to build urgently-required hospitals, schools, other public utilities, high-quality flats, units and houses […] than to build ugly unimaginative architecturally-bankrupt blocks of concrete and glass offices… Though we want all our members employed, we will not just become robots directed by developer-builders who value the dollar at the expense of the environment.”

• Five-Craft Agreement; Ironworkers Local 433; 2023; Southern California: Facing tiered contracts that created a “race to the bottom” in wages, training, and job security for probationary union members, Electricians, Ironworkers, Laborers, Millwrights, and Operating Engineers rallied together around a five-craft Project Labor Agreement to unionize solar work and eliminate tiered contracts.

• Heat-related Rules; IBEW & United Farm Workers; 2023; Washington State: A small farm workers union won heat protections for outdoor workers that are applicable across trades facing extreme environmental conditions,  such as electricians working outside on hot summer days or inside near industrial heaters.

Building trade and design workers,T imagine what we could win by organizing together!

1 QUESTIONS   

The building sector’s collective labor power has been weakened by an “us versus them” antagonism between the workers who design buildings and workers constructing them. These divisions reflect larger class- and race-based patterns of social segregation in our society. As such, they can be awkward or uncomfortable to confront. Nevertheless we must work together to defend and expand our common ground despite these false divisions. 

There are clear and shared interests between building trade and design workers to organize together toward a just transition–demands like better working conditions, more meaningful work, and greater decision-making power to shape what gets built and how. Our collaboration, though, is not “one size fits all”–it must be specific to the organizing context. 

Just as this pamphlet emerged from listening sessions between building trade and design workers, conversations grounded in mutual respect and solidarity set a solid foundation of trust for shared action. Here are some questions we used to write this pamphlet, which could also be useful for further organizing:

• What do you wish other people who work in your industry knew about your work? 
• What do you see as the biggest points of tension and the biggest opportunities for comradery throughout the building trades? Or across the design / build divide?
• Do you feel like you have agency in addressing the terms of your work and its relationship to the climate crisis? What climate solutions (big or small) in your industry do you wish more people knew about?
• How has climate change impacted you personally? How has it impacted your community? How has it impacted your work?

As workers, it is vital for us to make space for conversations to build trust and solidarity across our sector.

2 DEFINITIONS

When we began our listening sessions, there were several terms we needed to learn to have meaningful conversations between designers and building trades workers. 

Building Trades: manual trades and professions involved with the construction and finishing of buildings and the built environment on site such as iron workers, painters, electricians, carpenters, etc.

Apprentice:  within the building trades, a trainee who works under the supervision of experienced trade professionals (journeymen or masters) for a fixed period of time as initial training in their trade

Journeyman: a trades person who has completed an apprenticeship program or is an experienced worker, not a trainee, and is fully qualified and able to perform a specific trade without supervision; does not have a license and is not able to contract for jobs that are more than a certain value in labor and materials, depending on the trade

Master Tradesworker:  an experienced and certified journeyman who has ample experience and typically is involved in supervision of work in a particular trade on a construction project

Design Worker (Designer):  a worker engaged in the planning, design, drafting, and detailing of a construction project; typically becoming a design worker (planner, architect, interior designer, landscape architect, engineer, etc) involves a college degree and possibly testing to obtain a professional license

Fall Out: a worker who “falls out” on a job site has become incapacitated and is unable to continue their work; this is often due to dehydration, heat stress, or other effects of working in extreme conditions

Hiring Hall: used by building trade unions to supply contractors with qualified tradespersons; union members must register in the hall to be contracted for work; qualified members will be dispatched from the hall based on seniority

Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA):  the contract negotiated between a union (collective bargaining unit) and an employer to establish the terms of work, including wages, hours, and benefits;  can also include “bargaining for the common good”, which includes socially productive demands that benefit both the workers and the community, e.g. hospital staffing

Project Labor Agreement (PLA): a site- or public agency-specific deal that locks in union labor hiring and pay in exchange for a no-strike clause

Unionized Trades:  construction trades which have been organized according to collective bargaining agreements; construction unions are traditionally organized by specific trades, e.g. painters, plasterers, electricians, welders, carpenters, etc.

Walk-Off: when construction workers leave a job site without authorization, typically due to labor disputes, safety concerns, or dissatisfaction with working conditions

Wildcat Strike: a strike initiated by the workers without the approval or support of the union leadership

Lock Out: a suspension of work initiated by the employer as the result of a labor dispute; employer counterpart of a strike, used primarily to pressure employees to accept the employer’s terms in a new contract 

Just Transition: the process of moving from fossil fuel-based systems to sustainable systems of production, projects, and jobs; encompasses a range of legal, economic, and social interventions that oppose climate destruction while securing workers’ livelihoods and enhancing socially productive jobs and funding

Sustainable:  a practice that causes little damage to or helps the environment and therefore is tenable for long-term livability of the planet.

Greenwash: making exaggerated, misleading, or false claims about environmental or sustainable products or practices as a marketing strategy to boost sales or reputation.

3  ACTIONS

Together, we need to lay the foundation for a just transition by using our collective power. We demand:

• Collectively withhold labor from socially and environmentally destructive projects.
• Support climate reparations that account for a long history of environmental racism and dismantle structures inhibiting a just future. 
• Organize to redirect spending away from the militarization of police and toward programs that support communities through pollution mitigation, clean energy infrastructure, affordable housing, and resilience. 
• Support progressive climate, housing, and labor legislation like the Green New Deal, Homes for All Act, and the Climate Resilience Workforce Act.
• Advocate for safe, healthy working conditions for all workers in the building sector with the adoption of a stringent federal Buy Clean Act.
• Advocate for federally-funded workforce development training to meet the massive need for energy-efficient and climate resilient building standards. 
• Advance building and energy codes, while setting stringent standards for Environmental, Health, and Social Product Declarations.
• Develop systems for reporting impacts on communities living near extraction sites, and boycott the use of Red List materials. 
• Support Land Back to Indigenous communities through reinstating treaty rights and recognizing rights to unceded land.
• Build coalitions to develop new just transition legislation that directly addresses the building sector and centers skilled labor. 

Our sustained political power can transform the structure of our industry.

4 WHO WE ARE…

The Architecture Lobby (TAL)  advocates for pro-labor reform in the profession in general, and for improving the material conditions of architectural workers in particular. This pamphlet was authored by the TAL Green New Deal (GND) Working Group in conversation with the Labor Network for Sustainability’s Young Worker Project.

Email gnd@architecture-lobby.org Instagram @arch_lobby_gnd