On the west side of Manhattan, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, there is a nearly seventy-foot-tall concrete building containing five thousand tons of road salt. The walls of the Spring Street Salt Shed slope inward and outward in enormous pale planes; the whole thing is meant to resemble a grain of salt. Across the street stands a much larger garage that accommodates more than 150 sanitation vehicles, its long facades covered in glass and aluminum louvers. The two buildings were designed together, an attempt to make a sprawling sanitation facility fit into a residential neighborhood where residents had initially fought its construction. Writing about the complex in 2016, Architectural Record called the shed “as compelling as many pieces of public art in Manhattan.”

The Salt Shed is a Dattner Architects project, designed with WXY Architecture + Urban Design. So are the 34th Street–Hudson Yards subway station, the Bronx Library Center, parts of Hudson River Park, Riverbank State Park, and thousands of units of housing around New York. Richard Dattner founded the firm in 1964, and public architecture and infrastructure have been central to its work ever since.

Now the more than one hundred workers at Dattner are taking an unusual step in their industry: organizing with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The proposed wall-to-wall bargaining unit includes designers, architects, and operations staff across the firm, excluding management and certain other positions. Organizers say they have support from a supermajority of workers.