Data center doesn’t provide enough jobs, benefit to compensate for anguish on community

Editor:

What’s the tradeoff? Are data center jobs worth the mental anguish and harm?

At each of the recent public hearings on the STREAM Data Center at STAMP, the only supporters have been a handful of union construction workers. Their support is understandable.

Large data center developers, including STREAM, promise lucrative construction jobs. But are these jobs worth it?

Around the country, workers are raising concerns about the labor practices of Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm backing STREAM. Critics have named a litany of workers’ rights violations involving Apollo-owned companies.

Additionally, research increasingly shows that data center construction and operation jobs involve serious workplace hazards, including electrical dangers, arc flash risks, excessive noise, and fall hazards.

Should communities be forced to choose between economic opportunity and protecting their land, water, health, and future? At the three public hearings on the data center proposal, opponents have presented extensive testimony and evidence from doctors, lawyers, economists, environmental experts, hydrologists, urban planners, and sound specialists bolstering their concerns with the environmental, economic, and social impacts of the proposed data center complex.

While STREAM trumpets its intent to hire “local” workers, GCEDC in fact defines local as encompassing a 14-county radius. Do the jobs promised by STREAM meaningfully follow through on GCEDC’s original promise of 9,000 jobs for the GLOW Region? We think not.

In their recent testimony and other public statements, citizens and leadership of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, along with scores of local residents, have objected to large numbers of outside laborers benefiting from a project that has the ability to harm them and has already caused such mental anguish. They fear this monster could permanently affect their health, well being, harm the delicate local ecology, and ruin their way of life.

In addition to criticism of its labor practices, Apollo also faces mounting transparency and accountability concerns. Former CEO Leon Black was forced to resign because of his deep ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Now, shareholders have filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Apollo of deliberately misinforming them about the documented connections of current CEO Marc Rowan to Epstein.

For many residents, these controversies deepen concerns about placing long-term environmental and economic risks in the hands of a multinational investment firm with no connection to the community – in fact, a track record of harming local workers.

Increasingly, workers are grappling with the moral conflict – and tradeoff – of building projects meant to support their families today while fearing those same projects could create a less secure and less humane future for their children and neighbors tomorrow.

Organized labor is not the problem. Workers deserve respect, fair wages, and safe jobs. But communities also have every right to question whether massive industrial projects backed by billion-dollar corporations truly serve the public interest.

As residents and citizens of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation have urged, we ask union members and public officials alike to be good neighbors. Consider how this project would affect future generations: permanently altering the rural landscape, threatening the way of life of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the quality of life of local residents, and harming our irreplaceable local environment.

Kelly Hallenbeck, Bergen

Christine F. Zinni, Batavia

Richard Beatty, Batavia

RaeAnn Engler, Batavia