On Thursday, SHoP employees called off their historic bid for unionization. isabellinging reports on how the union drive began — and why it ended before a vote
Photo: Nick Dolding/Getty Images Four days before Christmas, approximately a dozen employees from New York–based SHoP Architects took to Instagram to announce their plan to unionize. The group, which had adopted the name Architectural Workers United, also delivered a letter to SHoP’s six partners to ask for their voluntary recognition of the union.
Instead, she pointed to SHoP’s recent shift to an employee-owned benefits plan as a solution to the changes that the employees had demanded. “We became an ESOP [employee stock-ownership plan] in March, and were already on the path to addressing those issues,” she said.
The employees know that, compared to some of the field’s worst offenders, SHoP is not considered a bad place to work. The midsize firm prides itself on having a personable workplace where partners know the names of employees, the projects are stimulating, and the office even has beer on tap. But the conditions there can still push people to the brink.
When it became clear that the DE&I initiatives wouldn’t accomplish what they had asked for, and after a round of about 20 layoffs in October 2020 that took many by surprise, employees began discussing the possibility of a union for the first time. As one employee said, “big changes needed to be made to the workplace” before they could even begin to think about how to hire more people of color. Some were nervous about the risk they were taking, especially after the layoffs.
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