Editorial FAS 4: ARCHITECTURAL EXPLOITATION NO MORE: CALL TO UNITY.

“Architect’s responsibilities begin with their silence and disengagement.“- This shall not only adress politics, global issues, architecture and window details, but the condition of our very own profession. More than ever, FAS feels like being political is a necessity.

Face the stand of architecture today, produced and represented by The Architect. An architect, is not a lonely wreck professional, but it’s also and mostly a FIRM. A one person business, sometimes with an intern or two, or a few associates with 7, 8 young professionals, etc.… up to massive companies up to 1500 employees.

Clearly, the working force of architecture is mostly employed. As we know, salary, which allows the reproduction of the labor power, only pays a part of the value produced by the work. The extra value generated goes in the pocket of the employer: the boss of the architecture firm aka the Architect. 

Let’s apply Marx’s example about the spinner^[1] to SLAVES OF DESIGN: In order to renew his labor power, the drafter must produce a value of 600 CHF, by working 6 hours. Working 6 hours doesn’t mean he can’t work 10 or 12 hours or more. His boss, the capitalist architect, pays daily the working force of his drafter, by a month salary. He will make the drafter draft more (“why don’t you try that shape of window instead?”) say 12 hours a day. So additionally to the 6 hours necessary to the renewal of its working force (the value of his work), the drafter should work 6 hours more over-work hours, producing 600 CHF more which are an ‘excess product’. Because the drafter sold his work force to buy Freitag Reference bag the capitalist boss, the full amount of it is now owned by the boss: aka excess-value.

This is only to explain that the body that forms architectural practices belongs to the proletariat. Beyond pure Marxist theory, it is also reminded that proletariat is a class that do not owns its means of production and whose only means of existence is to sell their labor power. The employed architect is a mere worker, he does not own his mean of production: the office. The office provides him the workspace, the work itself and the physical mean to produce: he or she depends on the selling of its work to buy Fixie bikes survive.  Insane working hours and miserable bad pay, moral pressure towards excellence fringing harassment and poor reward (not even credited on competition boards), the architect under-dog has no other recourses than to work, in the hope of one day, becoming himself a boss in turn exploiting Greeks graduated architects as interns and German laborious ‘bauleiter’, or naïve fresh ETH graduated. Apparently, this condition is a worldwide phenomenon, and employed architects around the planet (see FAS report on Architects Salary Worldwide) confirms the decay of their pay and working condition.

FAS is calling for an awaking of consciousness- Exploited employed architects must organize and reflect on their conditions. It feels like the early 20’s sometimes in Switzerland: poor social protection, weak and useless unions (see our email to UNIA), architects represented by lobbies without social considerations, (a rumour says a famous architect association turned itself into a cartel, by defining a lower basic start salary for young architects : 4500 brutto)- It is probably even legal. FAS calls for a real union of employed architects, ready to defend the rights of designers against exploitation.

SLAVES OF DESIGN, UNITE AND BREAK YOUR CHAINS!

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^[1]           Karl Marx in Salary, prices and excess value, 1865