One of the reasons a giant energy-related bill failed to pass the Illinois General Assembly last spring was because organized labor remained neutral. At least one union opposed the bill, but overall, the unions weren’t helping to move the ball forward – and they have a whole lot of much-needed legislative muscle.
That’s why the goal of the majority Democrats has always been to have support from unions and the major environmental groups when it comes to these big energy bills. And this one was big. A major electricity-storage program and an amped-up energy-efficiency component were just two of the items.
But last week, a top official with the Illinois AFL-CIO confirmed the organization is still neutral on language being circulated by negotiators.
Unions often tend to support their employers on issues like this. If something is going poorly for an employer of large numbers of union workers, then (unless the employers are viewed as hostile) the unions will push to improve their lot. This is particularly true in the public-utility and energy spaces and has been forever.
So what’s the issue here? Well, one of them is data centers. An environmental lobbyist expressed dismay last week, saying labor support for building more data centers has a fifty/fifty chance of derailing the entire energy omnibus process.
John Pletz recently had a very comprehensive and informative story about the data center industry in Crain’s Chicago Business.
Bottom line, the industry says the state’s Biometric and Information Privacy Act is stalling construction of new data centers, which generate millions of dollars in local taxes and employ union workers.
For your background, the Legislature did not include data centers when it revised the law in 2024 to protect many businesses from gigantic lawsuits for collecting biometric data without informed consent.
The data centers want the same sort of protections for allowing customers to store biometric information in “the cloud.” Others say they’re already covered by the law, but the companies still don’t want to take any chances in court.
Pletz’s piece included some strong statements of support for the data centers’ position from a business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134. About half the local’s membership works in data centers, which rely on lots of trained electricians to keep the centers running.
They’re becoming a vital source of jobs in an era where big Downtown Chicago construction projects have dried up.
The legislative working group on energy has people discussing data centers (which use a ton of electricity and water). And, because of that, the issue has seeped into the energy bill talks.
There are those who say a compromise could be reached. A couple of the “hyperscalers,” who operate gigantic data centers, want to be exempted from the Biometric and Information Privacy Act for doing things like using facial recognition in artificial-intelligence learning. But that’s probably impossible to pass, say some negotiation participants.
Instead, the idea is to grant the data centers their more modest ask of being treated like other businesses under the act. That could reopen the doors here to more construction and likely prevent neighboring states from poaching the centers, possibly polluting shared air with purpose-built natural gas electricity plants, draining shared water and sucking up electricity from the shared grid system, without any Illinois benefit.
In return, some reforms could be put into the bill, particularly on transparency of water and electrical usage and banning the use of diesel backup generators.
But there’s a big problem with this plan. The Illinois Trial Lawyers Association is expected to hotly oppose any effort to block or limit lawsuits, which is what they always do. Labor and trial-lawyers association are historical allies, and they’re both very prominent members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, so some unions have been given the task of neutralizing the trial lawyers. I talked with a lawyers-association executive late last week who said he has not yet been approached about this topic in relation to the energy bill. Either way, it’s up to the unions to resolve the dispute.
Would resolving this issue break the logjam and bring labor on board? I have no idea. There are so many moving pieces right now that it’s impossible to tell. But what I do know is that if the unions aren’t somehow moved to proponent status, or if the two issues can’t be separated from each other into two different bills, the energy legislation is in a world of hurt come the fall veto session.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.
