There are certainly legitimate (though exaggerated) concerns in communities on the impact of new data centers, but one of the hollowest is this one: “they only create temporary construction jobs.”

A friend of ours who works in the building industry had the perfect response: “Every construction project creates ‘temporary jobs’.”

Let’s do the math on how many of these “temporary jobs” there will be. McKinsey recently estimated $7 trillion of construction costs for new data centers in the years to come.

Roughly half of the cost of a construction project is labor costs.  So that’s $3.5 trillion that will be paid to mostly union workers.

The average pay and benefit for a union construction worker is a little under $100,000.

So this means tech companies will pay out the equivalent of a one-year payment of $100,000 to 35 million workers. Or, more realistically, $100,000 per year to one million full-time workers for 35 years.

That’s a lot of good paying jobs. No wonder the construction unions love data centers. Quick: someone tell Bernie Sanders.