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First published on May 20th, 2016
Laissez faire was planned, explained Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation: The origins of the market system go back to the intentional project of institutional transformation initiated in England in the 19th century, establishing …
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Suncor oil refinery in Commerce City, Colorado, on January 3, 2023. (Hyoung Chang / the Denver Post)
An oil refinery is poisoning the air in Colorado due to poor maintenance and inspection, according to a new report from federal environmental regulators. But instead of devoting money to deal with the problems, the refinery’s owner, Suncor Energy, has massively increased payouts to shareholders — at the urging of one of the world’s largest hedge funds.
The case illustrates how Wall Street’s investments in fossil fuels directly threatens the health of local residents and, in particular, vulnerable populations.
The Canadian oil and gas giant Suncor has made headlines in recent years for a series of chemical releases and air quality violations at its ninety-two-year-old refinery just outside Denver. In its new report, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the problems are systemic.
“The Suncor petroleum refinery in Commerce City, Colorado, may experience more air quality incidents because of inadequacies in preventative maintenance, testing and inspection of liquid level control systems and electrical equipment,” the EPA declared last week.
The inadequacies persist despite repeated fines and investigations from state and federal regulators. While Suncor has failed to make basic improvements to the refinery’s procedures and staffing, the company has delivered more than $12 billion to shareholders since the start of 2022.
In response to aggressive pressure from Elliott Management, a hedge fund headed by the Republican mega-donor and ruthless speculator Paul Singer, Suncor last year increased its stock buybacks by more than 120 percent to $5.1 billion, and its dividends by 67 percent to $2.6 billion.
Suncor and Elliott did not respond to our requests for comment.
Taken from Suncor’s 2022 annual report.
Suncor — a $39 billion company based in Calgary, Alberta — operates the only major refinery in Colorado. The facility is based in Commerce City, a low-income Denver suburb that has a large Hispanic population.
The Denver area has the sixth-worst air quality among US cities for ozone, a pollutant that damages the tissue of the respiratory tract and is correlated with a high incidence rate of asthma and decreased respiratory functions. Air quality advocates say that Suncor’s refinery has been a significant contributor to the region’s dangerously high ozone levels.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Suncor is choosing their dividends and profits despite the harm they have caused to our community,” said Ean Tafoya, a Denver-based environmental activist. “It’s time for a just transition — planned retirement for this facility and for remediation. Not only do communities get poisoned, they are also locking us into long-term climate change. I’m disgusted that we have a system that allows oil companies to do this, even though they lied to the public about the dangers of climate change.”
In May, state health officials sent out alerts to Commerce City residents near the refinery directing them to close their doors and windows and stay inside after an accidental toxic chemical release by Suncor, for the second time in a month. Commerce City residents typically avoid drinking the tap water due to the impacts of the Suncor refinery.
Suncor has been repeatedly fined for safety and health violations at its facilities in the United States, generating more than $6.5 million in penalties since 2008, according to data reviewed by us. That includes a record $4 million in fines for air quality violations issued by Colorado environmental regulators in 2020 for the Commerce City refinery.
As Suncor poisoned the community, the firm increased its dividends after Elliott Management, a $55 billion hedge fund, launched a pressure campaign last year targeting the company’s management — and specifically, the company’s decision to cut its dividend shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the firm was facing a multibillion dollar quarterly loss.
Elliott and other so-called activist hedge funds employ a similar playbook: they purchase a block of stock and then target a company’s management and seek to cut costs and increase dividends and stock buybacks, generating profits for the firm and other shareholders.
As part of its campaign, the hedge fund declared that Suncor’s dividend reduction “shook investor confidence.”
Elliott’s campaign materials further called on Suncor to “increase capital return to shareholders from 50 to 80 percent of discretionary cash flow after dividends,” and asserted that stock buybacks — when a company repurchases its own stock from shareholders to artificially drive up share prices — would be an “attractive use of capital.”
Since the start of Elliott’s campaign, Suncor has significantly increased its dividends and stock buybacks. The company repurchased $5.1 billion in stock last year, according to its annual report, up from $2.3 billion in 2021.
Elliott has now appointed four of the thirteen members of the company’s board of directors, despite holding just 0.75 percent of the outstanding shares of the company, suggesting that Elliott’s slash-and-burn tactics have support from the company’s major shareholders, which mainly include mutual funds like Dodge & Cox and the Royal Bank of Canada’s asset-management arm.
Mutual funds typically invest in a broad range of stocks, paying investors reliably higher dividends, and usually don’t interfere in the companies in which they invest.
Archived Elliott Management Website, RestoreSuncor.com
While Elliott attacked Suncor’s safety record as part of its shareholder campaign, the company’s efforts to boost Suncor’s payouts to shareholders means the company has less money to invest in the workers and technology it needs to resolve the air quality problems identified by the EPA.
These problems appear to be part of a pattern. The EPA’s report on the consistent inadequacies at Suncor’s Commerce City refinery follows the company’s 2020 settlement with the state over more than one hundred air quality violations at the facility.
In March 2020, Suncor entered into a $9 million settlement with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) over the refinery, the largest penalty against a single facility in state history. Of that sum, $4 million went toward fines and community projects, while $5 million was reserved for a consulting company to investigate problems at the facility.
That consultant’s report was partially used by the EPA to come to its sweeping conclusions about the safety of the Suncor refinery. According to the EPA, “from 2016–2020, Suncor had the greatest number of tail gas incidents that caused releases of excess sulfur dioxide,” compared to eleven other refineries. State permits for the Suncor refinery in Commerce City were repeatedly delayed after they expired, allowing the refinery to operate unpermitted. The EPA vetoed an initial permit from the CDPHE last March, before issuing a revised permit in September with expanded monitoring and toxic chemical release disclosure requirements.
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.
BA Union is now negotiating the first collectively bargained contract in the architecture industry. (Getty Images)
In a moment of heightened interest in unions across the country and an upsurge in militancy among “culture workers” in particular, a new industry is joining the labor movement: architecture. Last fall my colleagues at Bernheimer Architecture and I formed the first union at a private sector architectural practice. BA Union, with the support of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), is now negotiating the first collectively bargained contract in the industry.
As the first firm to organize, we stand alone, at least for the moment. The reason it has taken architecture workers so long to begin unionizing is because we have traditionally refused to identify as workers — and, as a result, have failed to see the need for collective organization to improve our conditions. Thankfully, architects are beginning to see the need to unionize to better their own conditions and those of others.
It’s important to start with a clear understanding of exactly what architects do. Traditionally perceived as what sociologist Max Weber would call a “privileged status group,” they have carried a certain level of, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “cultural capital.” In other words, architects have enjoyed social esteem due to a certain public idea of what they do — designing nice buildings for rich people — and their autonomy as creative professionals. But today, both conceptions mystify more than they help us actually understand architecture.
While architects are certainly professionals and have historically been considered artists, their day-to-day responsibilities are different than popular perception has it. In addition to designing buildings — a quality Karl Marx admired as differentiating us from the “best of bees” — architects are responsible for complying with building codes, accessibility laws, and zoning ordinances, all of which directly serve public health and safety.
Though we aren’t physically constructing the buildings, we are there every step of the way making sure regulations are met, as well as coordinating the litany of consultants that are required to build a building in the twenty-first century. These include, but are not limited to, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and civil engineers; landscape architects; lighting designers; and, depending on the scale of the project, roofing, facade, and even package-delivery consultants.
As buildings have gotten more complicated along with the governance surrounding them, the work of the architect, especially in cities like New York, has moved away from traditional artistic design. While much of this is due to an ever-evolving division of labor, we can also understand the evolution of architecture as involving increasing alienation of the architect from their work, as Marx would put it.
Architects are doing less traditional production like physical drawing and focusing more on bureaucratic compliance mediated through increasingly complex technology. In fact, today architects are not only producing drawings digitally; the entire process is being inverted. Through software such as BIM (building information modeling) owned by monopolies like Autodesk, computers now make the drawings themselves while much of the regulatory work of zoning and code compliance is left to the architect — a trend toward de-skilling also threatened by other forms of contemporary automation.
Meanwhile, a consolidation of building and a desire for low-cost services is eliminating work that used to support smaller artisanal practices, instead favoring larger, more “efficient” construction. In cities across the United States, the push for maximized unit counts through “economical” designs leaves little room for architectural craft, instead producing buildings that are eerily similar no matter the location.
At the same time, decades of neoliberal policies have made not only the construction and financing of buildings much more expensive, but have affected the material reality of architectural workers as well: today emerging architects are finding themselves in more precarious conditions than in the past. Thanks to crippling student loan debt, notoriously long hours, and a crisis-prone economy, a new generation of architects is beginning to come to terms with reality. Primed for exploitation by the academic studio environment through long nights spent on individual passion projects, young designers emerge into work settings that are all too willing to take advantage of such energy and enthusiasm for their own profits and prestige.
It doesn’t take long for the combination of low pay, uncompensated overtime, technological drudgery, and never-ending revisions from the client and boss to create a unique form of burnout. Even at relatively healthy firms like ours, many workers have a strong desire for more participation in the structure and “design” of their workplaces. While management may have good intentions, and even acknowledge and sympathize with the grievances of workers, the demands of the workday often supersede those concerns.
This has been the case for us at BA; many joined knowing it was a rare office that prioritized a work-life balance. Though we have felt respected and valued, we have still struggled to find an effective format to address other issues, whether they be technical concerns like proper IT management and software training, or more structural ones like project roles and job classifications, both essential to creating efficiently run teams.
All these questions are best addressed through the collective bargaining process, and though we are still in negotiations, the process has already established a Labor Management Committee through which even issues outside of bargaining can be discussed and implemented.
Why haven’t architects started to unionize until now? While some of it has to do with antitrust law and the protectionist credentialism common to all professions, many of the impediments to change have been self-imposed: whether it be a “love of work” myth, an obsession with avant-garde design, or even an eagerness to work free internships, many within the profession are now articulating the features of the industry that have made architecture unwilling to adapt.
However, less has been said about another key component of this stubborn resistance: class consciousness. Specifically, the aforementioned factors have encouraged architects, including employees, to identify more with the capitalist class than with the working class.
This identification has deep roots, as architects have historically associated with artisans and craftsmen. The common model is the studio, in which a seasoned architect creates an apprentice-type environment to train young designers. Additionally, before the emergence of the computer, architects would affiliate with other craft-based industries through the making of physical models and drawings, including studying with other craft practitioners. In fact, since the Industrial Revolution, many architecture schools have been lumped in with broader schools of “design.”
Seeing themselves as skilled artisans rather than workers, architects were content to fly under the radar, pleasing their clients while “usefully working” away in their own studios; as the glut of suburban housing and other postwar projects fueled the growth of artisanal practices and created a reliable path of upward mobility in the twentieth century, dissatisfaction was kept at bay. We are in a very different reality today, one in which capital’s endless drive for profit has degraded the architectural craft and produced a more exploitative workplace for architectural workers of all kinds. This reality calls for a new understanding of class in relation to architecture.
Much could be and has been said about the true “class position” of architects and designers, especially because of the complex relationship between firm owners and employees in a service-based industry. Is it too simplistic to define employees as exploited workers since they are wage laborers? Or are they complicit in the benefits, cultural and economic, attained by their practices at the behest of their employers? Does the fact that they don’t own anything within the firm, including the means of production of their drawings, override other considerations?
Though asking whether architects are artisans, petit bourgeois, or something in between makes for an interesting and important debate, time is not on our side. For an industry complicit in the climate crisis and entrenched in broader systems of capital and the injustices they generate, change needs to happen now, and unionization is a crucial tool for effecting it.
Thankfully, there is more organizing happening, as several other offices are pursuing unionization with the IAMAW and advocacy groups like the Architecture Lobby continue to support conversations around unionization, hosting events and providing valuable resources for prospective organizers. The potential of this work has appeared in some of the first meetings BA Union is having with other firms as they seek guidance in the unionization process, creating a new form of solidarity across offices.
But architecture is in a similar place as other design industries, far from the tipping point seen among other “culture workers.” While traditional pro-owner organizations like the American Institute of Architects (AIA) are now willing to entertain the idea of architect unions, if a new class consciousness is not fostered, the movement risks stalling out.
If architects want to participate in a “revived and reimagined” labor movement, they should understand that their class position uniquely situates them between traditional laborers (i.e., construction workers) on the one hand, and capital (developers and landowners) on the other. The construction industry, especially in a city like New York, has fought for rights and protections that keep its labor both safe and valuable — it might surprise some that the average salary of a typical building tradesperson in New York is higher than that of an architect. Developers and landowners have strengthened their own position not just through ever-increasing acquisition of property, but also dependence on low-cost design via architecture offices that are happy to outbid and undercut each other.
This has meant that building design is viewed at best as a luxury commodity and at worst as a service that can be trimmed until all that remains is what is necessary for minimal compliance. Without collective action to push back against these developments, the degradation of architects and their craft will only get worse, and the potential for solidaristic action with other workers will slip away.
Rather than identifying with the class that is paying them (albeit less and less), architects can shed their outdated aspirations and instead begin to identify with the construction workers who make their designs a reality. Doing so will help make it obvious why architecture workers should organize — a first step in addressing various problems in the industry, and the possible beginning of a new “cross-class” form of solidarity with traditional laborers and other social movements.
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Few people can say their actions helped to strengthen press freedom, end a war, and bring down a presidency. Daniel Ellsberg, who died today at the age of ninety-two, did just that. Ellsberg came to public prominence in 1971 when he photocopied a secret history of US involvement in the Vietnam War, what became known […]
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