The Split Inside American Labor

The United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters has made its peace with the AI buildout. Its members work on more than 90 percent of U.S. data center projects, and the union's position on whether that work should continue is a kind of strategic fatalism.

If we chose as a union to have a moratorium on building the data centers because we didn’t believe it was right for America, the data centers would still be getting built. — United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters

AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler sees the same buildout and draws a different conclusion.

If we’re going to chart the course for an AI future, it could be done pedal to the metal, slash and burn, no voice, no inclusion, imposing Silicon Valley’s will on the economy without any guardrails — Liz Shuler

These two statements, issued months apart by leaders who sit inside the same house of organized labor, mark a split that has no obvious repair — and the workers caught in the gap are not the ones either side is primarily fighting for. The building trades came to their alliance with tech through the straightforward logic of the jobs. OpenAI and Google have invested tens of millions of dollars in union training programs. Some union locals report that data center work now accounts for 40 to 50 percent of total man-hours ^[1]. When communities began passing moratoriums to block those projects, the construction unions did not stay neutral. They have lobbied against data center moratoriums in Maine, fought energy-efficiency standards in Illinois, and worked to preserve sales-tax exemptions for the industry in Virginia ^[1]. The calculation is simple: a moratorium that stops a data center stops the work that now sustains a large share of the building trades' membership. The communities, however, are voting the other way. Cassville, Wisconsin voted 44 to 0 to ban a billion-dollar data center, despite the developer's offer of 50 permanent jobs and $5.5 million in annual property tax revenue ^[2]. Indianapolis imposed a moratorium through December 2027 on a 23-to-1 vote. In August alone, municipalities in Michigan, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Virginia advanced new pauses on data center construction ^[3][4]. Port Washington, Wisconsin held the country's first municipal referendum requiring voter approval before awarding tax incentives for data centers over $10 million, aimed squarely at the $15 billion OpenAI-Oracle Stargate campus ^[5]. The industry's response has split between threat and concession. Brad Tietz of the Data Center Coalition raised the stakes beyond local politics.

If this trend continues and grows, it’s going to have significant consequences for our economic competitiveness [and] our national security. I don’t think that can be understated. — Brad Tietz

Microsoft president Brad Smith conceded the principle the industry is now being forced to negotiate.

Infrastructure buildouts progress only when communities conclude that the benefits outweigh the costs. — Brad Smith

Neither response addresses the third group of workers in this equation: the ones being cut to pay for the infrastructure the building trades are constructing and the communities are rejecting. Oracle has eliminated 21,000 jobs — 13 percent of its workforce — while spending $55.7 billion on data centers and equipment, funded by $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in stock sales, with plans to raise another $40 billion. The company confirmed a second round of layoffs this month ^[6]. The link between the cuts and the construction is explicit: Oracle burned $10 billion in cash in the first half of fiscal 2026 and raised its capital-expenditure forecast to $50 billion specifically to fund its AI data center buildout ^[7]. Meta eliminated 8,000 roles while posting $26.8 billion in net income and simultaneously building a $27 billion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana that will create 500 permanent jobs ^[8]. In Meta's case, the trade runs at roughly 16 to 1 — 8,000 workers cut, 500 permanent jobs created — and the new jobs are in a different sector, in different states, for different workers. Across the industry, more than 165,000 jobs have been eliminated to fund an estimated $740 billion in capital expenditure this year ^[8][9]. The infrastructure those cuts are funding costs more than the workers it replaced: Nvidia's own vice president has said compute costs for his team now exceed employee costs ^[10]. And a Gartner study found no correlation between workforce reductions and improved financial performance at firms deploying AI ^[8]. The tech workers being laid off have no natural ally in any of this. The construction unions are building the infrastructure that their own severance packages are funding — the plumbers' fatalism is, for them, not a strategic position but a material fact they experience from the outside. The AFL-CIO denounces the buildout in the sharpest terms, but its own building-trades affiliates are the ones constructing it, and the federation's denunciation has not visibly centered the laid-off tech workers whose severance funds the construction. The communities rejecting data centers are doing so on grounds of water, power, and landscape — Cassville's residents worried about their wells and electric bills, not about the Oracle employees who lost their jobs to pay for the facility the town voted down ^[2]. The plumbers' admission is the last word because it is the one that applies to everyone. Even if the building trades walked away, even if the AFL-CIO's denunciation became a unified labor position, even if the communities kept voting no — the data centers would still get built. The split does not matter to the trajectory. It only matters to the workers caught inside it.

If we chose as a union to have a moratorium on building the data centers because we didn’t believe it was right for America, the data centers would still be getting built. — United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters