The same voices warning that artificial intelligence will wipe out American jobs have a ready answer: stop working and take a government check. Some call it Universal Basic Income, others call it compassion. But I believe it is a calculated insult to the dignity of work and an admission that the people who actually build, move, and power this country have no productive role left to play.
My father was a Teamster, and that fact shaped everything that came after it. My time in Congress was spent building genuine relationships with labor organizations that most Republicans had written off as unreachable. The Teamsters, Ironworkers, and numerous other unions supported my campaigns not because I told them what they wanted to hear, but because I showed up, listened, and treated their concerns as the serious policy questions they are. When President Trump named me Secretary of Labor, I remembered my fathers work and the mission handed to me felt personal.
The real fight in this country right now is not left versus right. Rather, it is whether we will respond to technological change by paying millions of workers to disappear, or whether we will put American labor to work building the largest infrastructure mobilization since the interstate highway system, including the data centers, power plants, and supply chains that will actually power the future. I know which side of that choice my father would have been on, and I know which side I am on.
A SOUTHERN STATE JUST TOOK THE TOP SPOT IN ONE OF THE WORLDS FASTEST-GROWING INDUSTRIES
Labor unions large and small are driving an infrastructure buildout across the United States that rivals anything this country has undertaken in generations. Data centers, the physical backbone of the AI economy, are going up faster than anything we have built in recent memory. In January, the White House announced Stargate, a $500 billion private investment to build AI infrastructure across the country, and that is just one project. Dozens more are already underway. A single large facility can put 1,500 skilled tradespeople to work at peak construction, many of them clearing six figures with overtime. They accomplish this without a college degree, or student debt.
The workers building and maintaining these sites are overwhelmingly union tradespeople: electricians, pipefitters, ironworkers, HVAC technicians, and operating engineers. Electrical work alone can run 45 to 70 percent of a data center’s construction budget. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has called this the “largest infrastructure buildout in human history.” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, announcing a $250 billion U.S. investment commitment earlier this month, put it more plainly: “This is American investment. American technology. American workers.” They’re both right.
The country has a choice about how to meet this moment. The right answer is to lean in, to expand registered apprenticeships, cut the permitting red tape that slows power projects,
