Timothy J. Driscoll, President of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast for a wide-ranging Trades Day conversation that connected the BAC's 161-year history to the most pressing policy fights of today as part of the ongoing Labor 132 series presented by the National Labor Office.
Driscoll discussed the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2025, also referred to as the PRO Act, and the Faster Labor Contracts Act. He noted that more than 30 percent of union election wins do not result in a collective bargaining agreement and that arbitration, as a remedy, is not government overreach but a necessary guardrail for employers who refuse to bargain in good faith. He addressed AI's growing influence on design, engineering and job site management, called for worker-centered implementation and described responsible data center siting as requiring union labor and genuine community engagement.
Driscoll also condemned the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, describing it as an indiscriminate villainization of immigrants that has swept up BAC members with work authorization and even U.S. citizens in ICE raids. He also called out the expansion of independent contractor status as a system that simultaneously harms workers, honest employers, unions and state and local tax revenues.
Timothy J. Driscoll started his career in 1985 with Bricklayers Local 3 in Massachusetts, completed his apprenticeship and worked on commercial and institutional projects throughout the Boston area before rising through the union to become president of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. The BAC was founded in 1865, when two groups of workers in Philadelphia and Baltimore decided there was a better way to do business. They did it without the help of any labor laws, because they did not exist yet. The National Labor Relations Act would not come into effect for another seven decades.
Driscoll used that historical context during his opening argument. The NLRA, he said, was not simply a gift to workers. It was a framework for peace in a country experiencing labor strife. However, if meaningful labor law reform is not achieved, the strife will return, he said. That is not a warning, but a historical observation, he added.
The legislative priority Driscoll spent the most time on was the pair of bills that address the fundamental dysfunction in how workers get from an organizing win to a collective bargaining agreement. The PRO Act, also known as the Richard Trumka Act, is a fundamental rewrite of the NLRA designed to make labor law meaningfully effective for workers. The Faster Labor Contracts Act is a more targeted version that has drawn bipartisan support.
Thousands of union elections happen across the country each year, Driscoll said. Only 36 percent of those elections produce a collective bargaining agreement within the first year. That number climbs to 56 percent after two years. That means more than 30 percent of elections never produce a contract at all. Workers who went through the entire process of organizing, petitioning, campaigning and winning an NLRB election — and in many cases enduring months of employer opposition — end up with nothing.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act addresses this by setting timelines and, as a last resort, introducing arbitration when employers refuse to bargain in good faith. Critics have called this government-mandated arbitration imposed without consent. Driscoll believes the same people making that argument are perfectly comfortable requiring consumers to submit to mandatory arbitration clauses buried in their cable television contracts. The arbitration provision in the Faster Labor Contracts Act is not an imposition. It is a guardrail, he said. Driscoll then referenced two active BAC situations — one in California and one in Florida — in which employers have delayed reaching a contract for two years without penalty. Under current law, there is no punishment for that.
On the growth of artificial intelligence, Driscoll was careful to distinguish between where the technology is now and where it is going. For the BAC, the immediate impact is in the pre-construction phase, including design, engineering and building information modeling. AI tools are reshaping how projects are drawn up, sequenced and coordinated before a single brick is laid. That affects timing, scope, and ultimately what the finished structure looks like. The BAC is actively engaged with the design community to ensure members’ interests are represented in that digital frontier.
The job site applications are coming. Driscoll raised two issues he is monitoring: AI-driven surveillance of workers on-site and AI-assisted decisions about worker placement. Both are real possibilities, and both will need to be addressed in collective bargaining agreements before they reach scale, not after the fact. Technology is not inevitable in any specific form, he said, and every implementation decision is a choice. When those choices are made with workers and their communities, they can be productive. When they are used to ride roughshod over workers, the union will fight back, he promised.
Driscoll went on to describe data centers as the physical manifestation of public anxiety about AI. People are worried about what AI means for their futures and their children's futures. Data centers are the visible, concrete target of that anxiety. He is not dismissing the concerns. He is insisting they be addressed the right way.
Ground rule one for the BAC is that data centers need to be built union, Driscoll said. Ground rule two requires that, where they are located, this be done in coordination with communities, accounting for both environmental and economic impacts. He acknowledged there will be good actors and bad actors in the data center space. The union's approach will differ accordingly. Work with the good actors, fight the bad ones.
Driscoll also connected the data center conversation to utility costs, which have risen sharply in recent years. If data center operators are going to profit from the facilities, they need to pay for the infrastructure those facilities require. That is not an argument against data centers. It is an argument for responsible development.
Driscoll then shifted to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. He described it as a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between workers, making them suspicious of each other rather than united in pursuit of better wages and conditions. He acknowledged that any sovereign nation has the right to control its borders and determine immigration standards. What he rejected is the characterization of indiscriminate enforcement as thoughtful policy.
The BAC has had members with valid work authorization swept up in ICE raids across the country. U.S. citizens also have been caught in the same sweeps. Those members were eventually released, but only after high financial cost and serious trauma to their families. He offered a message to any worker who comes to the country, seeks legal authorization to work and wants to work under a collective bargaining agreement: the BAC will stand up for them every day of the week.
He also addressed Temporary Protected Status (TPS), noting that the administration’s use of TPS revocations as a deportation mechanism is an abuse of the system and a source of serious harm to BAC members and their families.
Driscoll's final topic connected immigration, labor law and the trades economy. The misclassification of workers as independent contractors is the primary mechanism through which low-road contractors exploit workers and undercut honest employers. It is not a side issue. It is central to everything else, he said.
He praised New Jersey's approach of dramatically raising fines on employers who misclassify workers, noting that current penalty levels are often treated as a cost of doing business, rather than a deterrent. Worker misclassification enables wage theft, denies workers the protections that come with employee status, deprives states and municipalities of tax revenue and puts compliant contractors at a competitive disadvantage. It affects workers, regardless of immigration status, connecting it to the enforcement climate Driscoll had just described.
He offered additional criticism for congressional efforts to expand independent contractor status. Workers are not asking to be classified as independent contractors, Driscoll said. They are being classified that way by employers who benefit from the legal fiction. More and more workers want to join unions, not to shed the protections of employee status. Expanding independent contractor classification, he said, stands the world on its head.
More information on the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers is available at bacweb.org.
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