Several US construction unions have formally joined the campaign in favor of data centers. Their officers and rank-and-file members are canvassing door to door, issuing public statements, and warning that they may withhold support from politicians who oppose new data center construction. The clearest evidence is an internal memo from Steamfitters UA Local 602, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, in which the union says it is drawing a "clear line" between politicians who back the data center building boom and those who do not. The industry has spent two years losing the public argument about power bills, water and land use. It has now acquired the one constituency that argument was losing it.
Local 602 works in Maryland, Washington and Virginia, the corridor known as data center alley, and the memo describes the moment as a tipping point for the local. Its members appear to be winning large contracts that technology companies sign through shell companies. As politicians in both parties increasingly position themselves against data centers — projects that are deeply unpopular in the communities that host them — locals like 602 stand to lose a major source of income. Sidney Bonilla, the local's treasurer and business manager, told the Journal that the union depends on these jobs.
The shell-company detail is the part worth sitting with. It means the contracts are structured so that the company whose name is on the building is not the company whose name is on the paperwork, and the visible party in the political fight is a trades local rather than a hyperscaler. That is an unusually good arrangement for the buyer. A data center operator lobbying a county board for a rezoning is a corporation asking for a favor. A steamfitters local doing the same thing is workers asking for jobs. The second framing is not available for purchase, and here it arrives at no additional cost.
Unions have historically played a progressive role in American politics, which makes organized labor lining up behind an industry position look surprising. It should not. The source's account traces a longer pattern: after two anti-communist campaigns, decades of state pressure and extended cooperation with employers, the labor movement learned to think narrowly, and in the right circumstances it has been willing to back unpopular and reactionary positions.
The examples it cites are specific. During the US war in Vietnam, with American conscripts dying in Southeast Asia, AFL-CIO-led unions mostly supported continuing the American occupation of the region. In the NAFTA era, many union campaigns abandoned international solidarity and recast global trade as a zero-sum contest between American and foreign workers. In both cases the rhetoric escalated into chauvinist violence: during the pro-war hard hat riot of 1970, union members beat at least 70 antiwar protesters in New York, and tensions around NAFTA produced racist attacks by white union activists on Asian-American workers. More recently, a majority of rank-and-file members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted to endorse Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, while the union's national leadership declined to endorse either candidate because it understood what a second Trump term would mean for organized labor.
My own reading is narrower than the historical one and harder to argue with. This is a financial calculation before it is anything else, and Bonilla said as much: the local depends on the work. The technology industry has enough money to supply union jobs and large contracts, and no comparable check is being written by the other side of the data center fight. Framing this as ideological drift gives it more intellectual content than it has.
Which leaves the timing problem nobody in the memo addresses. What Local 602 is defending is construction work, and construction work has an end date attached to every project. The political capital being spent now — the canvassing, the threats to withdraw support from unfriendly candidates — buys approvals for buildings that get built, and then the crews move on to the next site or they do not. A union that has staked its relationships with local politicians on a construction boom has tied itself to the boom's schedule, not to the industry's.