OPEIU president Tyler Turner calls on unions to unite against AI datacenters

Rockland County data center got $77M tax break, one permanent job

Tyler Turner, who leads the Office and Professional Employees International Union, published his call in a Guardian opinion column on September 14. OPEIU, based in Fort Worth, Texas, represents 90,000 workers in industries ranging from tech and healthcare to higher education and non-profits — sectors Turner described as “disproportionately impacted by the rise of artificial intelligence.”

Turner framed the roughly $8 trillion that developers plan to invest in AI datacenters — about a quarter of US gross domestic product — as a bet by “AI CEOs” that the technology would let “businesses across industries rake in profits by cutting out their largest expense: labor.” He wrote that the buildout would let corporations “redistribute workers’ salaries to themselves.”

Turner criticized the North American Building Trades Unions, which he said has signed collaboration agreements with BlackRock, Meta and OpenAI. He acknowledged that the deals secured “well-paying temporary jobs” for members but said they ignore that “all workers, including construction workers, are part of a class whose replacement is the explicit purpose of AI, and that data centers themselves produce a minuscule number of long-term jobs.”

Turner cited a Rockland County, New York datacenter that he said received $77 million in tax breaks and created only one permanent job, a deal he described as “the largest taxpayer subsidy relative to jobs created in United States history.” He also pointed to a Virginia study that he said showed datacenters produce less than 1% of the permanent jobs per dollar invested that other industries do, with those jobs largely going to technicians and security guards.

In his home state of Texas, Turner said 335 AI datacenters already consume enough electricity to drive up residential rates, with at least 248 more planned. The largest of the planned facilities, he wrote, is expected to consume as much electricity as 2.75 million homes — “more than Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin do combined.”

Turner described New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to halt permit-issuing for up to a year while the state develops a regulatory framework as “a practical, although insufficient, first step.” He urged unions to press for the federal AI Data Center Moratorium Act introduced by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, and to push for similar pauses in other states.

“In a survey of the Office and Professional Employees International Union’s membership last year, we found members are already being adversely impacted by AI in myriad ways ranging from layoffs to surveillance to being punished for errors created by AI models,” Turner wrote.

Turner wrote that “beyond the meager ratio of job creation to investment, we should not allow corporations to balloon our energy consumption while wildfires, superstorms and extreme heat ravage our country.” He described the industry’s backers as “Trump-funding, anti-union tech billionaires” who say they are “leading an AI revolution that will fundamentally transform our global economy.”

Turner asked readers to consider whether they would want a datacenter in their neighborhood and whether they want “a world where jobs involving human ingenuity, sensitivity and creativity are replaced by algorithms.” He urged unions not to sign deals that put members to work building facilities whose stated purpose is automation, writing: “If unions worked together rather than pitting our members against each other, we would not be begging billionaires for temporary jobs that will poison us and our children.”

He closed his column with: “At the end of the day, our data fuels their algorithms, our taxes fund their development and our communities host their hardware. The least we should demand is our fair share.”