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Trade Unionists of Landscape Architecture

Manifesto

We are a collective of landscape architects fighting to deliver better outcomes for workers, communities, and environments. We recognise the pervasive ways in which both workers and landscapes are systematically exploited. We aim to improve working conditions for landscape architectural workers, and to resist modes of development which have a deleterious impact on communities and environments.

There is an immense divide between our cultural values and the realities of our work. As landscape architects whose work is focused on the built environment, our collective professional identity is founded on aspirations towards creativity, social justice, and environmentalism. This is undermined by disempowering constraints of the capitalist economic system - and the profit-driven modes of development it requires– which rely on the production of work at the expense of our values and working conditions.

In connection with this situation, the current economic system simultaneously drives the unsustainable exploitation of communities and ecosystems globally. Converging social, ecological, and climatic crises continue to gain urgency, and the wellbeing and survival of life on earth depends on new ways of living and working.

Within this context, we must build worker power to resist our own exploitation, ensure the work we do does not contribute to these crises, and act to avoid the worst social and environmental consequences of multiple planetary emergencies. We seek to achieve this through solidarity and organised collective action.

Constitution

These are our demands:

End the exploitation of landscape architectural workers.

End exploitative work practices including unpaid internships, unpaid overtime.
Address wage secrecy provisions, salary gaps, underpayment, wage theft, job insecurity, and poor benefits.
Abolish workplace discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, or ability.
Enable all workers to have access to a healthy work-life balance.
Ensure all workers are remunerated with a fair living wage.

End hyper competitive culture and practice.

Foster a spirit of collaboration in our industry.
Dismantle the pervasive culture and practice of competitiveness which undermines our industry.

Build agency over the work we do.

Support landscape architectural workers to have greater influence over the type of work their labour contributes to.
Support more democratic workplaces and workplace structures.
Build power within the industry and the broader community to take democratic control over public space and commons.

Support decolonial struggles.

We recognise that all our work takes place on stolen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land, and as such our work is complicit in ongoing colonisation.
Therefore, we commit to support decolonial struggles such as Reparations and Land Back movements.

Cultivate landscape architectural practices which strive towards social, environmental, ecological and climate justice.

Work to dismantle the power imbalance between property developers and the broader public.
Advocate for increased government investment in human and more-than-human commons, such as parks, public housing, community gardens, libraries, and inclusive streets.
Support just transition for our industry.

Goals

End the exploitation of landscape architectural workers.

Build union membership among landscape architects.
Implement an industry award for landscape architects.
Encourage and support workers to engage in collective bargaining.
Make annual reporting of pay and conditions compulsory and publicly available.
Campaign for AILA to publish annual recommended salary bands instead of the salary survey.
Create a library of resources to educate landscape architectural workers towards worker solidarity and empowerment.

Build agency over the work we do.

Encourage more democratic workplaces through unionism, enterprise bargaining and worker councils.
Publicly identify design firms engaged in unethical projects and collaborations.
Educate workers about their right to refuse unsafe or unethical work.
Encourage collective and co-operative design studio ownership models.

End hyper-competitive culture and practice.

Publicly identify design firms which undercut their fees.
Educate design workers about the power of collective struggle, unionism, and solidarity.

Support decolonial struggles.

Vocally campaign for industry-wide material support of Land Back and Reparations movements.

Culltivate landscape architectural practices which strive towards social, environmental, ecological and climate justice.

Integrate more robust equity policies across spatial design workplaces.
Engage in grassroots activism to save or cultivate good quality public spaces.
Support existing democratic struggles over public space.
Establish new award criteria to recognise best practice based on principles of justice.
Begin planning a just transition for our industry.

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