The floor is too low. Help us raise it.

We design the buildings Australians live in, work in, learn in and are treated in. We carry professional liability on every project. We sign off on fire safety, accessibility, building codes and compliance. The scope of the work has expanded for decades.

The Award floor has not moved with it.

Our five-year graduates earn less than three-year construction-management graduates. The legal minimum for a graduate architect sits well below the benchmark for degree-qualified professionals. That is not a quirk of the classification structure. It is the undervaluation of architectural labour, passed down the chain until it lands on the workers doing the job.

The consequences are documented and ordinary. Fewer than 8% of us are paid for the overtime we work, though the Award requires time and a half. That is not culture. It is wage theft, at industrial scale, in nearly every practice in the country. Burnout follows. So do the people this profession cannot afford to lose.

Australia trains architects and loses them.

The Fair Work Commission is now reviewing whether degree-qualified professional classifications have been undervalued. The Architects Award is in that review. The Association of Consulting Architects, the employer body, has already told the Commission we do not deserve an increase.

That is exactly why we need our own voice in this process. Nobody else is going to make our case. This is a rare chance to lift the floor for every architect at once, not one practice at a time.