NAA! (Netherlands Angry Architects)

As a collective of architectural workers situated in the Netherlands, our objective is to improve working conditions in the architecture and design sectors.
We do this by highlighting the precarious nature of labour within the architecture sector, especially concerning workers who are just beginning their careers and immigrants and Dutch people with an immigrant background. Many of these individuals face unstable employment conditions, short-term contracts, low wages, and limited access to benefits.
We focus our work on sharing knowledge with the workers about their rights, helping to navigate within complex working conditions. Our educational approach (digital and live) aims to ensure that every worker possesses the necessary knowledge and tools to impact their work environment and safeguard their rights.
The climate crisis poses a complex set of problems for the architecture industry. The demand for innovative and sustainable design solutions that factor in upcoming resource shortages invests the architecture and design sector with a new relevance and urgency. Moreover, the sector’s historically subordinate relationship to the construction, insurance, finance and real estate sectors ensures that even its leaders have little genuine sway over the climate crisis: they may be able to lend a greenwash to a new development and perhaps even pull off a high-performing carbon neutral building, but they rarely control the materials used to make buildings and have no influence over the supply chains and workers that delivered these materials.
The phenomenon of climate migration adds another layer of complexity to the labour landscape, increasing the likelihood of architecture being called upon to develop the carceral system and make slum-housing more tolerable, while the architectural workers coming from migration backgrounds facing a great risk of exploitation in the workplace, unsafe working conditions, discrimination, and wage theft, to name a few.