Building trade unions have made repeated overtures about their support for data centers in recent months, hailing them — despite their many, many drawbacks — as job creators.
Now, leadership as well as the rank-and-file of a number of building trade unions are officially getting involved, by knocking on doors, issuing statements, and ultimately threatening to withhold support from anti-data center politicians.
In an internal memo viewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Steamfitters UA Local 602 explained that it’s drawing a “clear line” between those politicians who do and don’t support the data center boom.
“This is an existential moment for Local 602,” the memo explained. Covering the area of Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia commonly known as “data center alley,” the members of Local 602 are surely dining out on massive contracts awarded by big tech’s shell companies.
With more and more politicians on both side of the aisle coming out in opposition to the wildly unpopular facilities, unions like Local 602 one could soon face the loss of one of the largest cash cows to grace their books in decades.
As Sidney Bonilla, treasurer and business manager of Local 602 told the WSJ, “we are dependent on these jobs.”
Given that unions have played a historically progressive role in US politics, the apparent pro-industry turn that sets them so starkly against those interests today may come as a shock to some. Yet after two red scares followed by decades of state repression and corporate collusion, organized labor has become increasingly short-sighted, showing itself willing to embrace unpopular and reactionary agenda items when the opportunities arise.
For example, while poor American conscripts were dying in Washington’s horrifying war on Vietnam, unions led by the AFL-CIO came out in overwhelming support for the continued US occupation of Southeast Asia. And during the NAFTA era, many union campaigns dispensed with global solidarity, instead painting international trade as a zero-sum game between American and foreign workers.
In both cases, the unions’ rhetoric even escalated into chauvinistic violence. During the pro-war hard hat riots of 1970, union members bloodied at least 70 anti-war protestors in New York City, while xenophobic tensions around NAFTA resulted in racial violence against Asian-American workers by white union members.
Most recently, the majority of rank-and-file members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted to endorse Donald Trump’s 2024 bid for president (though recognizing what a second Trump term would mean for organized labor, the union’s national leadership declined to back either candidate.)
In other words, it isn’t surprising that building trade unions would come out in support of data centers. Ultimately, these calculations aren’t so much about social convictions as much as they are cold hard cash — the one thing the tech industry has in spades.
More on data centers: Trump Says You’re a Rube If You Don’t Want a Data Center in Your Backyard
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