It’s Time for Labor to Join the Fight Against Data Centers and Tech Oligarchy
There’s no room for dithering—the U.S. labor movement has to choose now whether to be on the right side of history.
Stephen Lerner
The U.S. labor movement is currently split on one of the most sweeping social movements of our time: the fight against data centers. And for unions, incoherence around the issue could be fatal.
I have been an organizer in the labor movement since I dropped out of high school to join the United Farm Workers union on the grape and lettuce boycott in 1974. Over the past 50 years, I’ve lived through numerous moments forecasted as the labor movement’s decline or revival. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) reorganizing wealth, power, and work on an unprecedented scale, none compare to the moment we’re currently living through.
Across all of my organizing — from supporting a year-long strike for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in the South to the Justice for Janitors (JFJ) campaign that organized more than 100,000 workers in the 1980s and 90s – one lesson has held true: unions grow when they are part of something larger than themselves. Movements for justice — whether it be economic, racial, or immigrant rights — give organizing what it needs most: hope, unity, and a vision of a world we can win. Workers join unions for more than a raise. They join to realize aspirations for justice and dignity.
Today, a massive buildout of data centers and a planned string of IPOs inflating the AI bubble are further concentrating wealth and power among a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires who back President Donald Trump, while soaring costs of living, surveillance, and job insecurity weigh on the rest of us. Yet as we face these existential threats to workers, labor, democracy — and, as some experts and safety researchers warn, humanity itself — the labor movement is divided over whether to oppose the forces driving the coming upheaval when the AI bubble bursts.
Some unions have stayed silent on the issue, despite growing backlash against data centers and the tech oligarchy. At the June AFL-CIO convention, delegates approved a resolution that acknowledged the harms and threats to workers posed by AI, while maintaining that “responsible data center growth” was possible if done with union labor.
Seduced by the promise of high-wage union construction jobs, other building trades leaders have championed data centers as the best opportunity for blue collar workers in decades. In a New York Times op-ed titled “Electrical Workers Love Data Centers. You Should Too.”, Don Slaiman, community relations director of IBEW Local 26 — which represents electrical workers in the Washington, D.C. area— argued that data centers are beneficial in their provision of good union construction jobs, calling them the equivalent of the Roman “aqueducts of our era.” That promise may turn out to be a dangerous mirage.
The record of trade union density also informs the current moment. At the end of World War II, 80% of construction workers in the United States were unionized, most under master contracts. Only 11% of building trades workers are unionized now. The issue isn’t a shortage in construction jobs — it’s a shortage in unionized construction jobs. While the sector has grown by almost 7 million jobs since the end of World War II, union membership has continued to hover around just 1 million.
As density has declined, Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) have replaced master agreements, causing unions to focus on staffing the highest paying jobs covered by PLAs. The jobs — and therefore membership density — ride the waves of economic recession and prosperity. They lose union members when union work dries up and regain fewer when work picks back up. The migration of the limited number of unionized workers to the highest-paying PLA-covered jobs allows formerly unionized work to go non-union.
In the 1970s and 80s, construction of the Washington, D.C., Metro system absorbed the labor of unionized trades workers and accelerated the deunionization of non-mega-project construction. The building trades face the same danger with the data center buildout: a short-term boost leading to a long-term bust.
History suggests that it would instead be wiser for labor to make common cause with the anti-data center movement. Labor now faces a choice that may well decide its fate for the foreseeable future: to support one of the biggest and most broadly based popular movements in recent history — the fight against data centers and the tech oligarchs funding their development — or remain at odds with it. A recent poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose data center development in their communities.
And data center protests are spreading like wildfire. While union militancy has declined over the past two years, opposition to data centers has surged. Over 340 protests erupted across 42 states since January 2025, and some 220 new grassroots anti-data-center organizations emerged within the span of only three months in 2026. By joining hands with this movement, and standing together against the tech oligarchs who seek to define our future, labor can set the stage for its revival. By failing to do so, or, worse yet, allying with pro-data center forces against this metastasizing grassroots movement, labor risks accelerating its decline into irrelevance.
After all, labor’s great surges in membership, density, and power have come when it was in sync with broader social movements. In the 1930s, the children of sharecroppers and immigrants flocked into industrial unions because the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was bound up with the New Deal and its promise of dignity for workers. In the 1960s and 70s, workers inspired by the civil rights and women’s movements flooded into public sector unions. Those gains stabilized overall membership even as the private sector sank to its current 6%, down from a postwar peak of 35% overall. Nor is this pattern confined to the United States. Abroad, labor movements in Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa found that opposing authoritarianism sparked surging growth.
I’ve seen up-close how this kind of dynamic can play out. The success of the Justice for Janitors (JFJ) campaign we launched in the 1980s can be seen only in the context of the larger movement for liberation that thousands of immigrant workers rallied behind. Hundreds of thousands of janitors galvanized after the Los Angeles Police Department viciously attacked immigrant janitors who were striking to improve working conditions in Century City in June of 1990. Many attribute the movement’s success to its strong organizing in immigrant communities. Immigrant workers were fighting not only for their rights on the job, but for their dignity as human beings. JFJ was carried forward on the shoulders of communities that demanded to be seen.
The same dynamic played out earlier this year when the Trump administration sent armed immigration enforcement agents into Minneapolis to terrorize neighborhoods as part of its mass deportation plans. When unions joined in coalition with community organizations to resist, a movement culture started to coalesce. This model offers an alternative vision of how labor can approach the growing fight against AI data centers, and the tech oligarchy. Such deep alliance-building sets the table for mass organizing and growth through joining up with broader resistance.
I have seen what happens when workers feel like they’re part of something larger, and I have watched what happens when unions retreat to protect what they have. The first builds power, the second depletes numbers.
We are fast approaching a “which side of history are you on” moment, one more consequential than any I’ve seen in the last 50 years. It is the labor movement’s task to act decisively in order to make sure it’s on the right side.
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Stephen Lerner is the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Lerner is a labor and community organizer and helped found the Bargaining for Common Good network.
