What We Offer

Arup provides our target of “reasonable prosperity for its members” through regular benchmarking of total benefits and salary packages against the industry. Furthermore, in the alignment with our “humane organization” values, Arup ensures that its normal overhead includes:

Our values-driven human resource policies are a luxury granted to us by our founder, Ove Arup, who did a remarkable thing during the 1970s: he and his partners gave away the firm to the employees!

After he wrote his Key Speech in 1970, Ove knew that future leaders may be tempted to abandon such lofty ideals under severe market pressures. In order to protect the integrity of his vision, Ove and his partners collectively transferred their ownership rights of the firm to a pair of charitable trusts whose only beneficiaries would be employees past and present “and their descendants”. This language made the firm impossible to buy and extraordinarily difficult to dissolve. Through this generous act, these forward-thinking leaders ensured that all future generations of Arup staff could operate in accordance with the Key Speech’s aims without fear of a hostile takeover.

Since we are “owned” by charitable trusts whose beneficiaries are Arup employees, we are the only stakeholders. Job stability is linked to our collective success in the market place. We are responsible to each other and for each other’s livelihoods.

With the company structure described above, after-tax profit goes primarily into one of three areas: