MR: I wonder, however, what is the incentive to employ someone when one could be using gig platforms and outsourcing labor to other countries.
reimagine
PD: I think it’s a smart observation. The firm owner’s choice becomes, why should I pay for health benefits when I can make everybody a contract worker? But my feeling is that those displaced workers, who used to have a salary and now forced to be contract workers, will themselves organize. I’m optimistic that they’ll recognize the injustice of this and I think we have greater awareness of how to organize against these unjust, unsustainable, and anti-worker neo-liberal practices. It might be how deprofessionalization happens. First the thesis: salary work in a supposedly prestigious profession; then antithesis: independent contractor just like other less prestigious workers; synthesis: a workerforward discipline that understands its worth. The profession’s gone, but being organized, we are economically astute and socially relevant.
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MR: What could be the mechanisms that we could use to organize across borders while our realities are so different? PD: It’s such a good question. That is one that I do wonder about. In my work on different countries’ architectural professional organizations, and recognizing how nationally bound they are, how radically different they are, and how difficult it is to import positive workerforward initiatives from one country to another - it just makes me wonder why there’s not an organization that organizes internationally. There is the Union of International Architects, but its main concern is the portability of licensure from one country to the next. If you have a license in Portugal, does it equal a license in France? The organization’s purpose is totally for firm owners and how they can get as much work as possible without evaluating the conditions or relevance of that work.
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