The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency that protects private employees’ rights, has accused the architecture firm Snøhetta of illegally laying off employees who supported a 2023 union drive, according to the New York Times.
NLRB’s complaint, issued Friday, says the firm dismissed eight workers for engaging in collective action “to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” It also says the firm “interrogated” employees about their feelings and activities relating to unions. Employees have a right to privacy, and union elections are held by secret ballot, the Times points out. Workers had tried to affiliate with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Tensions arose, says the paper, after employees approached management for voluntary recognition in 2023 and filed for a union election that May.
“All decisions regarding the work force reduction were driven by business considerations that started long before the unionization effort,” Elaine Molinar, a partner at the firm, told the Times in an email. The paper says that Molinar claims the firm did not know “in a large majority of instances” what the employees’ preferences were.
Snøhetta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Snøhetta originated in Norway, and had a reputation, former employees told the Times, for being “progresive and worker friendly.” But managers reportedly told workers that a union would have a bad impact on both the company’s culture and its bottom line. Management had discussed the union with workers “in an apparent attempt to gauge their voting intentions,” employees told the paper; the NLRB complaint makes the same assertion.
Just weeks after a vote in which the union lost by a margin of 35 to 29, management convened a meeting to announce a financial downturn at the company and the likelihood of layoffs, writes the Times. The next week, eight employees, all union supporters, were laid off.
Internal emails that were reportedly mistakenly shared with employees seem to indicate that the layoffs were in retaliation. A group of managers maintained a list of employees that characterized them by their union leanings. “Seven of the laid-off employees appeared on the list as union supporters,” says the Times, “and the eighth was listed as undecided.” Subsequent emails discussed discouraging future organizing efforts and indicated a lack of trust in a “unionist” for a certain position in the firm. Molinar tells the Times that the employee under discussion was not even considered for layoff.
Molinar pointed out that the union did not try to overturn the results of the vote on grounds of the company acting illegally, but a lawyer for the union tells the newspaper that the union did not have evidence of illegal action by the deadline to file a challenge to the election. The lawyer, William Haller, told the NLRB that he had “never seen such glaring evidence of blatant antiunion animus,” reports the Times.
If it is not settled, the case will be litigated before a labor board judge.
Architects are often expected to work long hours for little pay compared with similarly credentialed professionals, says the Times, in return for the promise of prestige, adding that those who oppose unions assert that nonunion firms would undercut those with unions by charging less based on lower compensation at their firms.
Snøhetta works in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture and product design. It has studios in Oslo, Norway; New York; Innsbruck, Austria; Paris, France; Hong Kong; Shenzhen, China; and Melbourne, Australia. Snøhetta’s first significant commission, per its website, was for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1989, followed by major commissions including the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo and the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York.
The firm touts its “horizontal organization structure” and non-hierarchical office layouts. It has won numerous awards, including the Aga Khan Prize for Architecture for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award for the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, in Oslo. In 2016, Snøhetta was named Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Architecture Innovator of the Year.
