The construction trades are building the machinery that will erase the economic reason for much of organized labor to exist. The North American Building Trades Unions have cut deals with BlackRock, Meta, and OpenAI to build the infrastructure that will displace the workers those unions claim to represent. This is not a nuanced policy trade-off. It is a union deciding its membership ends at the job-site gate.
The strongest defense of the deals is real. A data center creates well-paid construction work. NABTU has secured union-scale jobs for electricians, ironworkers, and other trades, along with apprenticeships and overtime. In Virginia, the data-center boom has brought union overtime even as communities fight over permits. The “temporary” label is not, by itself, an indictment. Project-based construction work is temporary by design, and a moratorium would end those jobs tomorrow.
Fine. That is the true half.
Now keep reading.
The boom under way or on drawing boards represents roughly $8 trillion in planned capital expenditure, about a quarter of United States GDP. For that colossal sum, the permanent job yield is close to zero. Virginia, which hosts more data centers than any state, generates less than 1 percent of the permanent employment per dollar invested compared with other industries. Those jobs are mostly technicians and security guards. In Rockland County, New York, $77 million in tax subsidies produced one permanent position — the largest taxpayer-to-job ratio in American history.
The temporary work is real. So is the permanent vacuum.
A data center is an automated facility. That is the point. It does not employ thousands of line workers because it does not need thousands of line workers. It takes public money, enormous quantities of electricity, and a mountain of construction labor to build machines whose stated purpose is to remove labor costs from every industry they can reach.
The building trades are not merely failing to solidarity-shop. They are the general contractor on their fellow workers’ displacement.
The Office and Professional Employees International Union’s own membership data shows AI is already producing layoffs, surveillance, and punishment of workers for algorithmic errors. The workers downstream are not imaginary. They are nurses, claims processors, paralegals, office administrators, and the people whose work gets renamed “inefficient” once a chief executive spots a cheaper machine.
The labor movement’s only durable source of power is labor itself. Scarcity-based leverage can vanish with the next round of layoffs. A union’s job is not merely to win the next contract. It is to make sure workers still possess leverage after the machinery is installed.
That is the part the building trades have chosen not to discuss.
The energy argument is even harder to wave away. In Texas, 335 operating AI data centers already push electricity rates higher for households and businesses that do not run server farms. At least 248 more are planned. The largest single facility is projected to consume more electricity than Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin combined — the equivalent of 2.75 million homes.
Consumption is not automatically bad. It is a market signal. The defense is that data-center power purchases will finance new gas-fired generation, expand capacity, and harden the grid for residential customers. Perhaps. But “the market will build enough power” is not an energy plan when the public is subsidizing the demand, absorbing the rate increases, and living through wildfires, superstorms, and extreme heat.
The grid is not a limitless warehouse. Pick two.
The push for a moratorium is therefore not an attack on construction work. It is a demand to stop treating construction work as compensation for the permanent destruction being built at the end of the project. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act in Congress. New York’s governor signed a statewide moratorium halting permit issuance for up to a year while a regulatory framework is built. Fifteen states are weighing similar measures, and operators are already redesigning sites to route around the restrictions.
Even New York’s pause has been characterized as insufficient. That is not an argument against a moratorium. It is an argument for a moratorium with teeth.
A pause buys time for energy-impact reviews, water-use rules, tax-subsidy limits, labor standards, and a serious negotiation over who receives the productivity gains. It prevents another gas-fired plant from breaking ground to feed a warehouse of machines designed to make human workers redundant. It gives labor time to organize before the project is treated as an accomplished fact.
A moratorium does not solve the underlying problem. It creates bargaining power.
The alternative is not to stand outside every project and shout. It is to own a piece of what gets built. Mandated project-labor agreements should govern data-center construction. Community-benefit agreements should tie subsidies to permanent hiring, local tax revenue, energy costs, water use, and enforceable public obligations. Apprenticeships should create a real pathway into operations and maintenance roles. Workers should receive a share of the facilities they build, through employee ownership, union-controlled funds, or public stakes tied to the subsidies that make the projects profitable.
The data, the tax breaks, the electricity, and the communities that host the hardware do not belong to the CEOs merely because the CEOs arrived with a spreadsheet. They belong to the public and to the workers whose labor makes the project possible.
That is the question the construction trades should be asking: who owns the thing?
The current answer is BlackRock, Meta, OpenAI, and every other firm expecting to turn $8 trillion of investment into lower labor costs and higher shareholder returns. The unions get the temporary wages. The owners get the permanent leverage.
That is not a bargain. It is a construction hat worn over a labor-replacement story.
Building unions have already threatened to withhold political support, which means the fracture is not yet total. Donald Trump is promoting data-center construction while even Senate Republicans warn privately about voter anger. Communities are trying to block projects directly, while the unions building those projects cross the picket lines those communities have set up.
The building trades are on the wrong side of every fault line at once: against fellow unions, against host communities, against the long-term interests of their own members, and against the grid their families share.
Tyler Turner is right that labor’s only path is solidarity across craft lines. NABTU’s deals with BlackRock, Meta, and OpenAI are not agreements to build buildings. They are agreements to build the mechanism by which those companies intend to eliminate the economic rationale for most of the workers the broader labor movement represents.
The construction trades should tear up those deals, join the moratorium fight, and demand ownership before excavation. The job they are actually protecting is not the next project on the bid calendar.
It is the entire future of organized labor’s reason to exist.