Don Slaiman has watched data centers double his union's workload, and on Friday he took that story to The New York Times, asking the country to build more of them.
Slaiman represents IBEW Local 26, the electricians' union for the Washington, D.C. region, ground zero of Northern Virginia's decade-long data-center build-out. Ten years ago, he wrote, members worked about 14 million hours a year. In 2025 it was 28 million, and the local admitted 600 new apprentices. Data centers, he argued, are the best chance in generations for blue-collar workers to claim a piece of the American dream.
The catch is that the jobs are in the building, not the buildings. Virginia's legislative watchdog estimates that a typical 250,000-square-foot data center peaks at about 1,500 construction workers over 12 to 18 months, then runs on roughly 50 full-time staff. The boom Slaiman describes lasts only as long as new centers, expansions and upgrades keep coming, and whether the pipeline holds that long, or any other region ever sees Northern Virginia's volume, is unknown.
Skeptics answered fast: the same money spent on the grid, housing or high-speed rail would employ electricians too. True, but data centers are the projects actually being funded at this scale, and that is why, as AI pushes them into new communities, construction unions are increasingly standing with tech companies in local fights over whether they get built. Slaiman's essay is that alliance speaking in public.