RIBA pledges to kick out wage abuse firms
Angela Brady outside RIBA in July 2010.
Source: Dan CarrierBrady promises to ’go after’ practices that fail to pay students at least minimum wage
The RIBA has said it will expel practices that ignore its new rules on student pay, with incoming president Angela Brady promising a zero-tolerance policy on the issue when she takes over in September.
From the beginning of July, RIBA-registered practices will have to pay students the national minimum wage under new membership rules. Members will be formally told of the changes next month when annual memberships renewals start.
The move follows recommendations from the RIBA’s Pay and Conditions working group set up last November by current president Ruth Reed.
This week Reed warned that firms that flouted the new rules would be struck off its register.
“They will lose their chartered practice status,” she said. “We’re trying to achieve a cultural change in the profession and I think the majority will handle this responsibly.”
Brady added that she would target non-payers when she becomes president. “I really will go after them,” she said. “This is not acceptable. It’s one thing giving students work experience but quite another exploiting them.”
Brady said one proposal was to make firms entering RIBA competitions sign a declaration that all students used had been paid. “Winning work using free labour is anti-competitive,” she said.
And she added that she would push for firms to pay more than the current minimum wage of £5.93 an hour for those aged 21 or over and £4.92 for those between 18 and 20.
”I will really go after firms that don’t pay students. This is not acceptable”
Angela Brady
“We shouldn’t be looking just to pay the minimum,” she said. “That’s not enough either. Students tell me that they feel they have no choice but to do it.”
The RIBA has said firms not paying students correctly will be given a chance to rectify the situation before they are suspended. Its group director of membership and professional supportRichard Brindley said: “If they still don’t put it right they will be struck off the chartered practice system.”
And he said students who were working at firms that ignored the new rules could call in anonymously and shop them.
But the founder of Architects Against Low Pay accused the RIBA of reacting too slowly on the issue.
Keith Tomlinson said: “The RIBA just stood by passively wringing their hands in the ivory tower in Portland Place. Unfortunately because they see themselves as a learned society they do not really operate effectively to promote and assist architects.”
Is the RIBA’s action on low pay tough enough? Join the debate here
Carrots, orange juice and dawn finishes
By BD Buildings Editor Oliver Wainwright
The RIBA’s announcement is a welcome step in the right direction but will it stop glamorous offices from luring star-struck students to their lairs to work for free?
I spent six months as an intern in a notorious Rotterdam sweatshop, rewarded with €400 a month – which rose to €600 a month after three months as a special treat – working an average of 100 hours per week, often more. This just about covered rent, and there was conveniently little else to spend money on: three meals a day were provided in the office, to prevent you from leaving, with fresh orange juice on tap – to keep the inevitable sickness at bay.
You started to notice things were wrong when you could no longer focus beyond the distance of your screen – a problem addressed in a rival office by the provision of raw carrots every morning – and when there was not enough space on the timesheet to log the 24hr shifts. Fun for a while but the novelty of dawn signalling the end of the working day soon wears off.
Barely paid internships have long been the norm in mainland Europe – where placements are often built into the university courses, or else topped up by the generous EU-funded Leonardo and Erasmus programmes – but such support structure has been crucially lost in translation to the UK, where “intern” is usually a flimsy disguise for free labour.
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Readers' comments (44)
@cadworkshop, regarding your post 1 April 2011 4:37pm
The Tories always laud competition as being in the best interests of the consumer. The microcosm of architecture is proof positive that sometimes competition benefits absolutely nobody.
There is a perceptible difference between something being cheap and something being value for money.
I am ashamed by the "I’m alright jack" attitude of some people on this site. I’m now qualified but even as a experienced part 2 training for part 3, I was offered roles of similar salary to the minimum wage now proposed. The fact is we are all trained or training as professionals however our industry doesn’t seem to recognise this.
Many of the comments are correct; the industry is now saturated with students dreaming of designing focal point architecture. This is where training is floored, selling the dream but not teaching or granting construction experience to make schemes work.
Its also true if you are running a practice at a loss then its not a business and you need to look closer to home for people to blame. Students have skill sets that many older experienced staff don’t and this makes them invaluable especially at the rates being quoted for minimum wage.
In terms of RIBA when this first flared up through a published article, they didn’t want to know. After losing face, small steps were made to backtrack and now the baton has been passed on. Im very disappointed with our professional bodies who seem to do very little for the titles we worked hard to gain and have to pay to maintain. I think the future role of architects in this country is now very much in question. To complete the course now with increased fees, student will incur debts of around 50K which will never be recouped on our salaries.
seven years of intensive education and the subsequent debt
to be offered minimum wage, appalling...
I laugh when I read of apparently incompetent work being taken over by RIBA members to fix, given the quantity of RIBA-Architect work that I (non-Architect and non-RIBA) have fixed over the years!
(non-Architect as ARB don't recognise my non-EU degree, and therefore also non-RIBA)
But then what could I possibly know about building construction, detailing, Building Regulations, planning guidance, integration of structure and services, and so on, merely from having successfully done so for the 16 years since I graduated with my worthless, non-UK Architecture degree, and did my equally worthless (non-UK) Part 3?
I have engaged with the RIAI and ARB in the past few months about protection of function.
Waffle wafted back about protection of the public along with a smell of port and old cigars...
A smugness borne of having sufficient clients should not detract from seeing the necessity of protection of function for all members of teh profession - but no. Set standards of behaviour, represent archtiecture, not archtiects. Fools!!!
You'd think a country that has undermined the standing of its archtiectural profession by allowing architectural technologists equal standing would see the damage this has done.
But no - by all means continue on your merry way. Great Britain, until your professional architects are crawling in the gutter, competing against creatively bankrupt draughtsmen, technicians and engineers, whose plagiarism will be hopefully taken from the best and never discovered.
Or you could join the rest of the world and protect the function or archtiects, justifying the extortionate costs of a five year full time course and two years professional practice.
And perhaps you could stop centring a profession - which should be about building - solely on winning fantasy conpetitions and design.
Start learning from the mistakes of the past in relation to construction. Its embarrassign to hear about another award-winning flat roofed disaster leaking.
Developers make enough from our sweat and toil.
Protect function.
Get paid decent fees.
Pay decent salaries.
Its common sense policy-making, not brain science!!!
Get on with it.
Michael, lovely idea, but at a part 3 lecture I attended once (back when I thought my Australian degree might possibly be good enough for ARB, alas not to happen) I remember the lecturer explaining how it was the Architecture profession lost its way, and control of itself.
Doctors diagree with each other he said, but won't accept that non-Doctors know more about medicine than they do; they keep their disagreements to themselves and within their profession. They certainly don't let non-doctors dictate how they should practice medicine.
Likewise lawyers are loath to disagree with other lawyers, at least out in the open, and certainly they don't disagree that only lawyers should be in the position to practice law and present themselves as being experts for hire on legal matters.
Architects on the other hand (and I still consider myself one, whatever the bureaucrats at the Rse end of the RIBA building say about it) are quite happy to attack each other, disagree over just about anything, and always reckon they are right while everyone else is wrong. As such they are easily split into factions which can be turned against one another.
As a result one way or another the profession lost control of what it does, so now Architects are a minority presence on the regulatory body, have lost control of their own profession as a result, and are steadily suffering the encroachment of others into what traditionally is their "territory", all with little more than a wimper.
What is to be done though, when regulating the protection of hard won title is the only function of a board composed mostly of non-architects, most of whom will be dead against any kind of idea that maybe architects (like doctors and lawyers) know best about the specilised profession they have worked so hard to become members of? Seeing as those non-architect members effectively sit in judgement over the architects who claim to be specialists?
The difference been that if a doctor makes a mistake the consequences can be fatal. But an architect? sure if a structural engineer makes a mistake the consequences can be catastrophic, but does designing a facade thats so last year really have such potentially damaging consequences?
Most people don't have a clue how to detail a facade or perform a structural calculation, however these days anyone whose seen a few episodes of grand designs considers themselves an expert on design. If people seriously think that drawing some pretty pictures, coordinating a few consultants and copying and pasting a flat layout is worthy of been described as a profession they need to think again.
Hald - the further problem with Grand Designs and similar programmes is that the architects (presumably ARB and possibly RIBA members) who are seen on them rarely seem to instill much confidence in either themselves or the 'profession'.
UK architectures' problems really began when they allowed so much of their control to be passed over to Q.S's and, shudder, 'project managers'.
Charles, Hald and Clayfeet, I hear what you say.
You have to get away from the officious incompetent running these organizations - I use incompetent in relation to how they are handling the profession, not how they discharge their duties as architects, if you take my meaning.
There are too many experts but the disaster that is UK archtiecture can be traced back to the modern movement and the elimination of styles.
Styles were a language people could speak - "buildin" was spoken in different languages, certainly, but people were eloquent in the languages they spoke.
The dastardly modern movement merely wiped out European Architecturla heritage at a stroke, the way the two world wors wiped our European Aristocracy and for the same reason - to allow the ascendancy of the Banal Americans and their anonymous espousal of the international movement.
We now talk a lingua fraca in architecture, with its roots nowhere and everywhere, and common sense and building competence thrown out the window.
But to come back to the issue of regulation of the provision of services, which would lead naturally to the establishment of sustainable rates for those providing the services.
Is there a downside for Architecture or Architects by regulation the provision or architectural services?
No, would seem to be the obvious answer.
Is the provision of architectural services regulated in most countries in the developed world?
Yes, apartr from around ten of them, or so.
What conceivable reason would there be for generating a situation where the provision of services in unregulated?
In our society, which sees a lot of the larger jobs go to larger offices, despite the fact that you don't get better servce?
Could it be - to engineer a situation that keeps those offices - and their overpaid principals - supplied with cheap labour?
Why yes indeed - I believe it could.
So who do the RIBA and the RIAI represent again?
Not the rank and file architects, that's for certain.
Michael this has nothing to do with the RIAI (even if Angela is a member)