Still, he says, “if they're going to get built, I'd rather they go union.”
Jesse, an IBEW electrician, tells WIRED that he has concerns about community pushback to data centers.
“I think it's ridiculous if, to build a data center or any kind of a business, you're going to significantly impact the lives of that community in a negative way,” Jesse says. But he believes those issues should be addressed by contacting state and local governments, not by begrudging electricians who need the work.
The sentiment is common. The forces behind the data center buildout are much bigger than one individual person, so why should an individual be judged for working on one?
An electrician named Dante tells WIRED that he has worked on data centers operated by Intel, HP, and Amazon. “Nobody judges me” for data center work, he says, because “we're almost always working for the worst possible people in the end, but we all need a paycheck because of the unlivable world that those same rich people have created for us.”
“Either I'm wiring up a lumber mill or a Dollar General warehouse or a data center or an Amazon facility or whatever else,” Dante says. It’s “essentially the same kind of work—all for already extremely rich pieces of shit to use for the exploitation of the working class so they can get more rich.”
For others, that rationalization doesn’t cut it.
One electrician tells WIRED that job scarcity can fuel an attitude that since workers “have to put food on the table,” they should be immune to criticism. Pushing back against this mindset, they say, “would not end well at a union hall.” But privately, they take issue with it.
“If work is tight and a company comes in and wants to build orphan-crushing machines (or some other diabolical contrivance), you'll get a lot of shrugged shoulders, grim faces, and ‘I hope they pay double for overtime,’” the electrician says. “It's an attitude I hate.”
“I've participated in some professional development groups where different degrees of compartmentalization are deployed to justify the work, usually landing on ‘It's going to be built no matter what, I might as well get paid,’” an apprentice tells WIRED. They believe that for some people, a paycheck will always justify the work they do for it, “regardless of what the project is.”
“But of course that's easy for me to say,” the apprentice adds, “because my livelihood doesn't depend on them.”