← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Unionizing American Architects
00:30:05
This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the I.C.E. raid at a battery factory in Georgia, the growing inequality in the U.S. during both Trump terms, the 75 U.S. military airstrikes on Somalia in 2025, and France's mass...
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- [00:20]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Before we get into the substantive parts of today's program, two quick announcements if you want to participate in the plenary session and workshop on October 11th about how we can make the solidarity economy real. It's presented by the Left Forum, the People's Network for Land and Liberation, and the Cooperative Economics alliance of New York City, known as cnic. We are participating, we at Democracy at Work. It will all take place October 11th at Women Building up in Brooklyn, New York. Again, go to our website, click on the banner and all the information, including how to register, will be there for you to use as you see fit. One last item. We are now being besieged, as some of you have noticed, with fake videos, I.e. videos made probably with the help of artificial intelligence that take my words and reassemble them, often take parts of my face and reassemble them so it looks like I'm speaking of about issues I haven't spoken about, taking positions that are not mine, but all with my face. You've been so kind as to build up your numbers. We have over half a million YouTube followers now that I have a reputation that's worth other people making fake videos about. You've reported them? We report them to Google, YouTube and all of that. If you see them, if you suspect them, let us know. We can file away complaints about them, which we do. And at least we can tell you that yes, indeed, you've caught a fake because there are more and more of them out there. I regret to have to say to you. Okay, let's jump right in to the topics I want to begin with the attack by the ICE army of the United States on a battery factory in Georgia. I'm sure you saw the news a few weeks ago. It was the biggest single operation of ICE in its half year history. You might have imagined that if this is your biggest attack arrest, that you would be careful, that you would be cautious, that you would make sure you've gotten it all right before you go in there with your overarmed masked warriors. But you'd be wrong if you thought that. The battery plant is operated by two of the largest corporations in South Korea, Hyundai and lg. They recently made a huge investment in the Georgia battery electric battery for electric vehicle factory. They did that in part because Mr. Trump's tariffs threatened against South Korea are usually offered with the idea we'll reduce them or postpone them or limit them if you promise to make big investments here in the United States. In other words, you may be a South Korean company, you may be expected by the South Korean people who helped you develop your industry to make your investments there, to create the jobs there, to improve the economy there with your investments. But we'll hit you with a tariff if you dare. We want you to take that money and make the investments you here. Your money should help our economy, not your economy. And so they made an investment. And what was their reward for a big investment? 400 employees. High tech, high machinery operation ICE attacked them. Attacked them? For what? Did they violate a law? No, they had working there immigrants, it turns out some of them had the visas that made all of it perfectly legal. Others of them didn't have those, but they didn't hurt anybody. But ICE went swooping in with all the drama of a lousy TV show, throwing all these working people going to work each day, paying their taxes here in the United States, spending their wages in the community where they live. They were shackled, they were photographed, they were herded around, they were abusively treated for what? And they've all gone back home to South Korea. And I watched the footage as they landed their special plane filled with the 350 or so of them that were South Korean. They were welcome home as heroic victims of the United States. And you know what that means. And in case you're wondering, the South Korean leader said it at the airport. He said, you know, we invested because you wanted us to. Anybody who knows how that works knows you start off with your own workers that are used to your. Your system of setting up factories, your system of working the parts of the factory together so it's successful. And then of course, we will train local people to do this work that's part of the investment. Did Mr. Trump not know that? Did he know it, but the ICE people didn't know it? Does one hand not know what the other hand is doing? It sure looks like it. And you know what? This is a good way to understand why there isn't a big movement of people coming here. Oh, yeah, we've had the big promises, but those big promises are now more and more unlikely to be kept when the other countries of the world look at what they risk. Collecting their own workers, shipping them over here to get their business started, only to have the ICE people make a cheap TV show out of arresting and shackling them. This is all theater. It panders to. We're fighting the immigrants, scapegoating the immigrants. Is Mr. Trump's number one calling card. And I guess even sabotaging his own claim to be bringing business here is worth it if he can keep the theatrical of scapegoating immigrants in the forefront of people's TV watching. I want to turn next to the latest inequality numbers and phenomena in this country. Because one thing you should be clear on, whatever else you may think, neither in Mr. Trump's first term as president nor in his current second term has he done anything to stop, let alone reverse, the deepening inequality of the United States. And it is going to be one of the great criticisms when his two terms are done of what the presidency of Mr. Trump meant and failed to achieve. If you think he ought to have made the United States less unequal, well, then he failed in both of his terms to do it. I'll give you just a few of the relevant statistics. Between August of 2024 and August of this year, 2025, average real wages average rose less than 1/2 of 1%. In other words, when you take into account that it's an average and that many people are below average, and you know a little bit about how fuzzy these statistics always are, there's been no change. Effectively less than half a percent means next to nothing. The average CEO pay across 2024, in contrast for the standard and poor, 500 corporations, that's the richest 500 corporations in America, their pay for the CEOs went up 7%. So let's do that again. Average real wage of workers, that's the real wage. Adjusted workers for prices virtually unchanged, less than half of 1%. But for the CEO who tells the average worker what to do, it went up 7%. That means the richest, those CEO types, their wealth went up, their income went up 17 and a half times faster than that of the average worker. And you know what that means? It means inequality in America is getting worse. And then we had several weeks ago a really stunning milestone of inequality. The board of directors of the Tesla Corporation that makes those electric vehicles offered elon Musk a 10 year pay package of $1 trillion. No one, no CEO, has ever gotten that before. And to whom is that being offered? The person who's already the richest person on this planet. Mr. Musk is estimated to have between 350 and 450 billion dollars. The richest person, and to the richest person is given the biggest pay increase ever. That's the kind of system we live on. Of course our inequality's getting worse. We're making the rich richer and everybody not at all. You And I live in a system that works that way. It is really important to understand the failure of this system to treat people equally, to make the rich richer. And the rest of us worried about where our lives are going. I want to tell you also about the statistic I found stunning that the United States military has operated air attacks against the Al Shabaab movement in Somalia 75 times this year, 75 bombing raids from a president, Mr. Trump, who opposed all these endless wars, he told us. Yeah, apparently, except for those that he's operating. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. I want to bring you back for a remarkable interview with a young man who's organizing architects who have resisted unionization but are now at the forefront of the union movement here in the United States. And that's important for other professionals as well as the working class as a whole to know about. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic update. I am very happy to bring to our cameras and our microphone Chris Beck. He's an architect and a union organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. He served on the organizing and bargaining committees for the Bernheimer Architectural Union, a new and a first in a hundred years of an organized union of architects. And he went on from there to continue to organize workers with the American and, excuse me, the Architectural Workers United, which is a campaign of the International association of Machinists. And he also teaches at the New School University here in New York City. So first of all, welcome, Chris, and thank you for your time.
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B
Thank you. It's great to be here.
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A
Okay. You just released literally on the 1st of October. If I have it right. A new book, and it's called the labor of Architecture. Tell me, why did you write this book at this time? What's the importance for our audience of this event? Which I think is important, but I want to hear it from you.
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B
Sure, yeah. I think there's kind of two main reasons why I wrote this book. Which one is to share the. The work. Right. The collective story of how we got to the first architecture union in 100 years, like you said. So that's the one purpose. Right. But I would say the second reason is to really ask the question why this took so long and to look back into some of the historical, theoretical barriers towards unionization within the architecture industry. Right. I mean, we have other professions, engineers, nurses, doctors, that are highly high union density, but we're the first in architecture. So that's really kind of the core of the book is why was this so difficult to do?
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A
All right, good. You're doing my work for me. Now I want to ask you, why was it? What did you find? Why has it been. And you're right, it's not just architects. Right. A lot of professionals, yes. Medical. Are organized, but a lot of professionals have had a hard time finding their way to unionization. How do you account for it among architects?
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B
Yeah, it's a good point. So we see some professionals are really organized, like you said, and others aren't. And it's a big question that I'm still thinking a lot about. But at least for this book, in terms of architecture specifically, it's a very old profession. Right. I mean, it goes back a very long time. It's not the oldest profession, but it's one of the older professions. And so it really saw. I mean, we could go back to like ancient Greece or whatever. It's some form of it, but we really started to see a change in the medieval ages. Medieval ages where you had a kind of actual. What was called a master builder on site. Right. That was the historical term for an architect, a master builder on site, coordinating various trades. And so this was a live, you know, building in action kind of discipline. And often the master builder was a stonemason or someone who had a labor kind of oriented understanding. That really started to change in the Renaissance. Right. And that's where we kind of start to see a strong separation of. The architect is more of a theorizing person. Right. A more a director of things, but off site. And that's really where you get the practice of drawing to be incorporated in architecture. It's not to say there Wasn't any drawing in the Middle Ages, but during the Renaissance, through figures like Alberti and Leonardo. Right. You kind of get drawing as a practice, and that really becomes embedded in architecture. And so you go from the master builder on site. Right. To then the architect doing drawings and giving them to someone else to build. And so that's really where you get that first separation that I think, you know, it seems like we're going way back here, but I think that really starts to lay the groundwork for why architects distance themselves from labor. Today, it's a little different. We have a kind of. In contemporary practice, just to bring it back to today, you have this sort of triangular relationship, Right. So you have, like, the owner who represents capital, the builder who represents labor, and the architect who represents design. Right. And so in theory, they're supposed to act as a sort of set of checks and balances, but in reality, we see architects and designers in general identify much more strongly with the owner's interest. Right. With the interest of capital versus labor on site. And even, you know, you see that in reality, where architecture, excuse me, the construction industry is one of the highest, you know, highest unionized industries in the country. Right. And has been like that for a while. Whereas the architect resembles something much more like the owner, when in reality, their position is something quite different than that of the owner.
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A
Yeah. I remember when I was a graduate student, I had friends who were going through the architectural program, and they were being told by their professors something that we were not told in our classes, namely, that part of their future was Would be endless cocktail parties where they would have to go and hang around in hopes of being noticed by the capitalists, the ones with the money, so that the project, whenever they got around to it, would include them rather than somebody else. It was a wholly different way of thinking about your own professional future. Okay.
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B
Exactly.
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A
I know many of my people in my audience have this in their mind. Is artificial intelligence a major immediate threat to the architecture profession? And might it therefore be part of what makes people open to your unionization efforts?
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B
Well, I think the short answer is absolutely, where is AI not coming into any industry and beginning to really change things. But again, it's really very important for the architecture and design context in general is to think about taking a step back again and, say, realizing this sort of evolution of technology that started in the 80s with the computer introduced in the workplace. If we go back that far, we can see that Harry Braverman's predictions and observations about the degradation of labor. Right. And labor monopoly capital are really coming to design now. We're a little behind, but it's coming now. And so we see the computer introduced, right? And that's where we get rid of our craft in drawing, right? Our physical craft. And then really, more recently, we've seen a different type of model, which is called bim. It stands for Building Information Modeling. That's pretty standard across the building industry. Government contracts are going to require all offices to use this. In that case, the architect is making a model on the computer, and then the computer is actually making the drawings, right? So now we're not even making drawings anymore. So it's not hard to see where AI is going with this, right? With technology, this. This sort of trend that again, Braverman so astutely observed, right. Of this just general pattern of. Of the degradation of work. So, you know, you can. Even right before the computer was around for architects, you'd go into an office and you'd see everyone rolling their sleeves up, smudges all over their hands, right? It was like a very physical process to make actual manual physical drawings. And so that part of architecture has completely disappeared. We don't make physical drawings anymore. And so I worry about this question a lot, to the point where, if we've seen what AI is doing with writers and other kinds of creative labor, what's going to be left with architecture if we don't push back in the way that we've seen writers in Hollywood push back? And the only way they've been able to do that is through a strong union effort. We don't have that right now. And if we don't have it, I'm incredibly nervous about what's going to happen.
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A
It's an old lesson of the working class. Your enemy is not the technology. Your enemy is who's in control and how do they use the technology. I used to teach this in my econ classes. I would explain that the machine that replaces labor can lead the employer to fire half his workers and replace them with machines. But there's an alternative. He could cut their working day in half, keep all the workers there, have the machine, and have the beneficiary of technology be the leisure of his workers rather than the extra profit by firing half his workers. And that's a political, ideological question, has nothing to do with the technology. A union could make it happen, but without one, you're at the mercy of the capitalists. And they will use the technology to profit because that's what they're in the business for anyway. Lead me to my next question. Is There a basic difference between architecture that is there to create the aesthetic environment of living for the people, or is it there as an instrument of profitability?
- [24:55]
B
You know, I think much like any industry of the US right, we are here at the service of profit and that's, I mean, we are a service based industry. There are exceptions. There are actually here in New York there are a number of unionized architects that work for the city government and their union is DC 37. So, you know, across the country there are unionized architects doing civic and governmental work, but it's a really small percentage. I mean, most of the market is in the private sector. And so there's. This is where a lot of this work. Trying to understand it. Not only do we want to have architects understand that, you know, the majority of them are working class in my opinion. Right. They're living on a salary. And without that salary, they're, they're not going to have an easy time providing for themselves those who are employed. Right. But you know, that getting beyond that, it gets to this question of, well, where do all the decisions come from about what gets designed? You know, who starts a project, who initiates it, where's the money come from? We're just totally excluded from all those questions in the private sector and we're really at the behest of what the client wants to do. And so this project is really hopefully the start of sort of raising a little bit of awareness about how can we insert ourselves in those original conversations. We all go to school with really good ethical aims of wanting to make the world a better place. And the reality is very starkly different when we get into our jobs and all of a sudden are doing projects for Saudi Arabian oil companies or other prisons or all these things that are really morally questionable.
- [26:51]
A
You know, for me, it's also a question of democracy because the rich people are the ones who hire you and tell you what design they want or don't want. But the rest of us have to live with that for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years. That building that you helped to design, I have to walk through it, I have to walk around it, I have to look at it. And I don't have other things that might be infinitely more supportive of my life and my dreams and the quality of my aesthetic life. And yet the mass of people who have to live with the architecture are excluded, like the architects themselves, from the design idea. That seems to be only in the hands of the tiny minority rich enough to hire an architect. We're running out of time but could you in 30 seconds or less tell us a little bit about the Utopia Project in Scandinavia and whether that has anything to do with what you're hoping for?
- [27:53]
B
Yeah, I'll be very quick. The Utopia Project was in the 1960s, a project in Sweden that was initiated by the government unions and private sector. Right. And the idea was to bring in journalists and graphic workers to actually work with the private tech companies to design the software they were using. And it was a really radical model, but it spread. You know, it wasn't long lived, but it spread to quite a few industries in Sweden. So to me that, you know, that really gets at this existential question of technology and architecture design, because right now we have two monopolies who own all of the design production, which are Autodesk and Adobe. And so we have no say in the design of our software. And so I see this model not just as the Hollywood writers strike model, which is about protecting and being against AI taking over, but this being really powerful in a democratic way, democracy at work to actually get ahead and design software that you want to use and that benefits you. But right now it's a total one way street and we're forced updates constantly that we don't ask for. The subscription price goes up every month, right. Kind of rent system. It's a total mess and we're totally at the behest of these two companies. So you could see something like this in combination with the minor plan, right, the sort of wage labor savings fund that was also proposed in Sweden, really dramatically transforming the workplace of designers.
- [29:30]
A
I wish we had more time, Chris, because it's true for all the professions or for many of them. But I want to thank you and I give a shout out to people that are interested to pursue connecting with you to be part of your unionizing effort, if they can help. I'm sure you'll be welcoming whatever inquiries they send to you and to all of you, I hope you found this as interesting as I did. And in any case, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.