For decades, architects have enjoyed a place alongside doctors and lawyers among the professionals most revered by pop culture and future in-laws.

And for good reason. Architects spend years in school learning their craft, pass grueling licensing exams, put in long days at the office.

Still, there is one key difference between architecture and these other vocations: the pay. Even at prominent firms in large cities, few architects make more than $200,000 a year, according to the American Institute of Architects, which advocates for the profession. Most barely earn six figures, if that, a decade or more into their careers.

On Tuesday, employees at the well-regarded firm SHoP Architects said that they were seeking to change the formula of long hours for middling pay by taking a step that is nearly unheard-of in their field. They are seeking to unionize.

The organizers at SHoP, which has about 135 employees and is known for its work on the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and a luxury building south of Central Park previously called the Steinway tower, among other projects, said well over half their eligible colleagues had signed cards pledging support for the union.

They plan to affiliate with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and are asking for voluntary recognition of what would appear to be the only union at a prominent private-sector architecture firm in the country.

“Many of us feel pushed to the limits of our productivity and mental health,” the firm’s union backers, who call themselves Architectural Workers United, wrote in a letter to the firm’s leadership Monday. “SHoP is the firm that can begin to enact changes that will eventually ensure a more healthy and equitable future.”

Half a dozen SHoP employees said they worked about 50 hours a week on average, and often 60 to 70 hours when a key deadline loomed, usually every month or two. They said this was common even among more junior architects and designers who make $50,000 to $80,000 a year — above what many in other fields make, but a strain for workers who typically accumulate tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.

“SHoP was founded to practice architecture differently and has always been interested in empowering and supporting our staff,” the firm said in a statement. The firm did not say whether it would recognize the union.

The nascent effort extends beyond a single employer. David DiMaria, an organizer for the machinists union, said he had talked with architects who were in the process of organizing at two other prominent New York firms, which he declined to identify.

And those campaigns appear to reflect a rising interest in unionizing among professionals of all kinds. Tech workers, doctors, journalists and academics have all turned to unions over the past decade amid such concerns as a loss of autonomy and control at work, stagnating wages and lower job security.

The squeeze can be especially pronounced in professions that offer large noneconomic benefits, whether a sense of mission at a nonprofit or the cultural cachet of working in book publishing or television production. Such businesses rely on a cadre of young employees who toil for meager wages and a chance to make it in a prestigious field.

Architecture often combines these strands, longtime practitioners and scholars say, featuring stiff credentialing requirements, a priestlike devotion to the mission and a cultural self-importance.

“There’s all this stuff that makes us succumb to the ideology that architecture is a calling, not a career,” said Peggy Deamer, an emeritus professor at the Yale School of Architecture.

This mentality has often seduced architects to accept relatively low pay, added Professor Deamer, the founder of the Architecture Lobby, an advocacy group with about 300 members mostly in the United States.

As a practical matter, several architects said, their firms are often too willing to take on uncompensated work, making it harder to pay employees fairly.

Firms that specialize in customized designs, like SHoP, regularly spend weeks generating proposals for the competitions through which clients award contracts, and for which the firms receive little or no pay. And many firms propose fees that are too low to support adequate staffing, several experts in the field said.

“People lower their fees, and once you lower your fees — I don’t know if it’s a slippery slope, but it’s definitely a slope,” said Andrew Bernheimer, the principal at Bernheimer Architecture and an associate professor at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

Architects at SHoP and other firms said their employers typically resolved this contradiction through vast quantities of unpaid overtime.

Jennifer Siqueira, an architect who joined the firm in 2017 and was let go during a round of layoffs in November, repeatedly put in over 60 hours a week while working on plans for a residential building in 2020, she said.

“I’d work until midnight, have dinner in front of the computer,” Ms. Siqueira, who has been involved in the union effort, said of the hectic weeks. She was pregnant and had to “get up to go to the bathroom every 15 to 30 minutes.”

Jeremy Leonard, an architect who also joined the firm in 2017, said that he had planned to take time off in the summer of 2020 for an annual vacation with his family, but that a supervisor discouraged it because of an important deadline. Mr. Leonard’s solution was to take the trip but work the entire time.

“I holed up in a laundry room for 12 hours a day and emerged for an hour for dinner,” said Mr. Leonard, who is also involved in the union campaign.

A SHoP spokeswoman said the firm negotiates the highest fees the market will bear, and that it “walked away from several projects this year that we determined would not pay for adequate staffing.” She added that SHoP seeks to keep workers employed long-term rather than staff up for particular projects and lay people off when they end, as some competitors do.

Scot Teti, a senior manager at SHoP who started in a position held by some of the union supporters, lauded the open communication between workers and managers and worried that unionizing would inhibit it by introducing “a level of rigidity.”

The firm also said it had become 100 percent employee-owned this year, but equity shares have yet to be allocated and employees were skeptical that they would have much additional say in how the firm was managed.

The organizing campaign dates back to the fall of 2020, just after an earlier round of layoffs and as working remotely prompted employees to focus on how consuming their jobs were.

A few workers who had been holding weekly meetings on how to make SHoP more diverse pivoted to discussing unionization, which some had learned about through the Architecture Lobby.

Several employees said SHoP’s labor practices were better than the norm in the industry — for example, the firm pays interns. That they still felt so stressed, the workers said, reflected the depth of the industry’s problems.

OMA, a rival firm, recently raised hackles on social media for a job posting that included “No 9-5 mentality.” A former junior architect at the firm said in an interview that he had often left the office at 10 or 11 p.m., and sometimes after 3 a.m.

A spokeswoman said that OMA strove to ensure a healthy work-life balance but that “there is always room to improve.” The job ad was intended to appeal to applicants with creativity and passion, she said, adding that the company removed the phrase “when we saw that it was being interpreted as code for a requirement to work endless hours.”

Union backers at SHoP said they hoped to negotiate policies that might, for example, give workers an hour off after every two hours of overtime. (SHoP currently provides some compensatory time off, but employees say the amounts are small and inconsistent.)

This would require principals and managers to use overtime more judiciously. SHoP employees said principals often wanted several renderings when a few would suffice, or drawings that lay beyond the scope of their contract — like a landscape.

Under federal rules, employers must pay most salaried workers time and a half after 40 hours a week if the employees earn less than about $35,000 a year. They are generally supposed to pay overtime to professionals who make above that amount if the workers have little decision-making authority, a provision that labor groups say is frequently ignored.

Phillip Bernstein, an architecture professor at Yale, agreed that pay and hours were a major issue in the profession, but worried that unionizing would backfire. “I don’t think this effort will work, nor do I think it’s good for the profession in the long run,” he said by email.

Professor Bernstein cited the risk that rivals could undercut firms with higher labor costs when bidding for work.

But union supporters at SHoP argue that if enough firms follow suit, the unions could help lobby city or state lawmakers to impose rules governing fees and staffing to prevent such undercutting.

While long hours are common, firms that produce relatively standard building plans sometimes have more humane policies, many architects said. But sophisticated design firms often regard themselves as artistic enterprises as much as conventional businesses and can have fewer safeguards.

“We are an anomaly in the business world of architecture in that we don’t keep track of hours,” Billie Tsien, a founder of the roughly 35-person Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, known for its inventive designs on projects like the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, said in an email. She added that employees took time off as needed and that most stayed a decade or longer.

Firms like SHoP and OMA are also known for doing imaginative work, but at a higher volume and for more commercial clients, giving them greater economic influence over the industry. Union supporters believe that puts them in a strong position to reshape workplace norms.

“We’re very innovative in a lot of our office work,” said Danielle Tellez, another SHoP employee involved the union effort. “This feels like an extension of our ambition to lead the industry, to innovate in the industry, but for our professional standards.”

“You could feel Christmas was coming,” Amanda Whiteside, a manager at Gordon’s Wine Bar in London, said of the crowds and buzz. “And then it was gone.”

Throughout Britain and in other parts of Europe, new government restrictions combined with heightened anxiety over the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus have drastically reduced business at restaurants, pubs, event venues and stores, prompting urgent calls for additional government assistance.

In Britain, the government responded Tuesday, announcing 1 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) in aid for the hospitality industry, with one-time grants of £6,000 and rebates for employees’ sick leave.

The additional assistance was promised as a fresh wave of anxiety over the economy washes over the region. In France, government ministers announced Tuesday additional aid up to 12 million euros for travel agencies, events, caterers and indoor leisure companies that suffer big operating losses this month.

In Spain, the government has scheduled an emergency meeting with regional leaders on Wednesday to discuss whether to adopt new restrictions. Italy’s government is meeting on Thursday.

“We are in a different phase now where lockdown will be potentially more costly,” said Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “Up until now, we’ve been used to lockdowns followed by support from the government. I think that will be the case as well, but support will be more conditional, less comprehensive than before.”

Britain recorded the highest number of Covid-19 cases in Europe over the last seven days, according to the World Health Organization.

On Monday, organizations representing more than 100,000 businesses around the country sent an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, demanding more tax relief and grants to tide them over.

Such concerns were echoed elsewhere. In Germany, businesses are pressing the government to lift new requirements that customers must show proof of vaccination or recent recovery. And in the Netherlands, where the government announced a lockdown over the weekend, calls to the nation’s business registry asking for help climbed past 400 on Monday — seven times the number logged the previous Monday.

Although the surge of coronavirus cases brought on by the fast-moving Omicron variant has not yet resulted in the kind of strict lockdown imposed by the Dutch government, British businesses argue that the combination of mask mandates, vaccination requirements and uncertainty during the peak holiday season imperils their survival.

The retail, hospitality and leisure sectors “are teetering on the brink,” said Matthew Sims, who helped orchestrate the campaign and leads a business improvement group in Croydon, south of London.

Restaurants, pubs and bars have said that since the government added a new series of restrictions, known as Plan B, on Dec. 8 as a response to Omicron, cancellations have been rolling in and foot traffic has disappeared in some areas.

At Gordon’s Wine Bar, it was common to find every table in its cavelike cellar and on its outdoor patio full and a long line of customers waiting. Then Plan B was put in place.

The drop-off, said Ms. Whiteside, the administrative manager, “was very dramatic.”

Customers thinned out, and several staff members got Covid, she said. Gordon’s is now offering only outside service, and Ms. Whiteside estimates that sales are down 25 percent.

Half a mile away, in Soho, the Coach and Horses pub was similarly contending with fewer customers and sick staff. Last week, business was off by a third, while on Monday it fell “off the edge of a cliff,” said Alison Ross, the manager.

Three of the four full-time staff members and two of the four part-timers had contracted Covid.

The hospitality industry, which lost out on the holiday bump in sales last year, was counting on a busy season this year.

Simon Emeny, the chief executive of Fuller, Smith & Turner, which owns roughly 400 pubs including the Coach and Horses, said in a statement: “We are right back to where we were in March 2020 with the government keeping hospitality open, while effectively telling the public not to socialize.”

The company has temporarily closed 20 pubs, a spokeswoman said.

About 200,000 hospitality and leisure businesses will be eligible for the new grants. The government will also cover the cost of legally required sick pay for small and midsize businesses and is topping up a culture fund for organizations including theaters, orchestras and museums, with another £30 million.

From sectors not included in the package, there were complaints.

“Travel agents, tour operators and travel management companies will rightly be asking why they haven’t been given the same treatment as other businesses that are suffering at this time,” said ABTA, a trade association of travel agencies and tour operators.

In the Netherlands, where most shops, bars, restaurants, gyms, outdoor sports, cultural venues and schools are closed through January, some business owners fear they may never reopen.

“That is something that I ask myself every day,” said Omar Waseq, who owns a cheese bar and film cafe in the center of Utrecht. “I’m not 100 percent sure.”

Mr. Waseq estimated that he is losing $50,000 each month while his cheese bar, Kaasbar Utrecht, is shuttered, and $100,000 at the cafe. Plans to rebuild a nightclub he owns that was burned in a fire in January have been postponed. He has had to let go most of his 80-person staff and is now trying to make money selling mulled wine in the streets and cheese packages door to door.

Mr. Waseq said that because he opened his business after the pandemic began and did not have 2019 sales to use as a benchmark comparison, he was not eligible for government assistance.

Ron Sinnige, a spokesman for the national business registry, the Kamer van Koophandel, said the agency was flooded with calls this week asking about financial assistance, advice or liquidating their operations. Some were seeking guidance on how to qualify as an essential business — could a clothing store sell candy and soda, could a beauty salon offer postsurgical massages or list Botox injections as a medical procedure?

The questions were a sign of people’s creativity and despair, Mr. Sinnige said. “As opposed to previous lockdowns, people are really at the end of their financial flexibility and emotional flexibility,” he said.

France has canceled a menu of year-end celebrations and barred tourists from Britain, a blow to the ski industry.

On Tuesday, the Swedish government imposed some new restrictions that included allowing only seated customers to be served in restaurants and bars.

Ireland imposed an early curfew of 8 p.m. on restaurants and bars that began on Monday, while limiting attendance at events.

In Denmark, restaurants and bars must cut off serving alcohol after 10 p.m., and a slate of venues and event spaces including ​​theaters, museums, zoos, concert halls and Tivoli, Copenhagen’s landmark amusement park, have been closed.

Switzerland’s restrictions that bar unvaccinated people from going to restaurants, gyms and museums are expected to last until Jan. 24.

In Germany, the check-in process at stores, which requires stopping everyone at the door and asking to see vaccination certification and an ID, was deterring shoppers at what would normally be the busiest time of the year, the German Trade Association said.

Retailers surveyed by the group reported a 37 percent drop in sales from Christmas 2019.

“After months of lockdowns, the restrictions are once again bringing many retailers to the edge of their existence,” said Stefan Genth, head of the Trade Association.

A court in the northern state of Lower Saxony last week threw out the restrictions there, after the Woolworth department store chain challenged them on grounds that they were not fairly applied and that requiring shoppers to wear masks provided sufficient protection. The ruling on Thursday raised hopes that other states would follow its lead, giving a final boost to last-minute shoppers.

“Last weekend was better, but overall the shopping season has been more than depressing,” said Mark Alexander Krack, head of the Lower Saxony Trade Association.

Eshe Nelson contributed reporting.