Trade unions have a centuries-long history of squaring up against the might of industrial capitalists to fight for rights that workers now often take for granted, from the eight-hour work day to the federal minimum wage to workplace safety laws.
If you were to imagine how unions are responding to the tech industry’s massive push to build AI data centers across the country — an issue that’s currently uniting the grassroots left and right to an almost unprecedented degree in opposition — you might reasonably assume they’re staunch foes of the projects.
But in the topsy-turvy world of AI, where alliances often seem to contradict traditional political categorization, you’d be dead wrong. Instead, unions are playing a pivotal role in the tech industry’s push to ram data centers through local opposition. According to the Associated Press, they’ve become a publicly visible force alongside pro-business Republicans and big tech corporations — two famously anti-labor cohorts, ironically.
The core factor underscoring this contradictory stance is construction employment. When data center developers approach communities in search of land to erect their computational complexes, one of the main carrots they wave around are jobs, both temporary construction labor and permanent full-time labor.
At this point, we know that data centers aren’t a major source for quality, full-time jobs after they’re built. They do require tons of contract construction gigs, however, which generates short-term work for building trades workers, and growth for their craft unions.
“When people say, you know, ‘data centers are the root of all evil,’ we’re just saying, ‘look, they do create a hell of a lot of construction jobs, which we live and work in your communities,’” president of the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council Rob Bair told the AP.
In effect, these unions are abandoning their communities in favor of narrow self-interest — prioritizing immediate, short-term gains while ignoring the material harm data centers inflict on their communities.
It’s not a new phenomenon, but one which has become increasingly common as trade unions have been defanged. For example, the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the US, infamously supported the US war on Vietnam for its stimulating effect on industry, siding with conservative and military industrial complex forces over the progressive anti-war movement.
The real tragedy here isn’t that unions have forgotten how to fight — but that increasingly, they seem to have forgotten who it is they’re fighting for in the first place.
More on data centers: A Tiny Town Is Building So Many Data Centers That There’ll Be Almost Nothing Else Left