2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

US engineering professional societies have been influential institutions that propagate a constricted understanding of the roles and responsibilities of an engineer within society by upholding an alignment of industry over engineering reflective of a hegemonic adherence to business professionalism. The ideology of business professionalism advances beliefs that engineers are, and should be, unshakably beholden to capitalist corporate owners and the industries they extract profit through. In this paper, we examine the historically anti-union attitudes and actions of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and their adherence to the ideology of business professionalism, through analysis of ethics case studies published by their Board of Ethical Review (BER). As an advocate of professional engineering licensure and as leaders in engineering ethics standards, NSPE’s consistent anti-union stance lays bare a clear bias to the needs of industry and the capitalist mode of production at the expense of the collective bargaining power of engineers as workers. NSPE is an influential organization in the codification of engineering rules of practice, so it is valuable to deconstruct their application of their code of ethics to justify anti-union arguments.