America's AI boom is a jobs opportunity, not an excuse for universal basic income

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 father’s 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.

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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 and get serious about training the next generation of electricians and pipefitters so that real demand and real skill drive real wages. That is the winning play, and it is already underway. It rewards the trades that built the interstates and the power grid the first time around, and it rewards the regions of America that have been told for two decades that their skills were obsolete and that they should "learn to code."

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The other answer being pushed, with increasing volume, is universal basic income. The pitch is that artificial intelligence will eliminate work, so the government should write every American a check and call it compassion. It isn't compassion. It is surrender. Work is not just a paycheck. It is the thing that lets a parent stand up, look their kids in the eye and say, "I built this."

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The fight for the American worker is won by showing up year round, not just in November, and by choosing the side that builds, earns, and owns its future over the side that offers checks and excuses. The data center moment is the test, and the trades are ready, the workforce is ready, and the voters in the middle are paying very close attention.

This is a commitment to what comes next: an American economy where the people willing to build the future get to own it. The interstate builders of the 1950s didn't ask for a participation trophy, and neither will we. Let's get to work.