Sean McGarvey on NABTU, OpenAI and the Trades Future

Thousands of building trades leaders descended on Washington this week for the North America's Building Trades Unions annual Legislative Conference — and NABTU President Sean McGarvey joined the America’s Work Force Union Podcast to explain what they are fighting for, what they have already built and where the movement is headed.

From a landmark partnership with OpenAI to record apprenticeship enrollment, to stalled infrastructure funding and the urgent need for a federal AI transition plan, McGarvey laid out a vision for the building trades that is not waiting — it is shaping what comes next.

• NABTU added more than 47,000 net new members across 14 crafts in 2025, following 100,000 net new members added in 2023 and 2024, with more than 300,000 workers currently enrolled in registered apprenticeship programs.
• The NABTU-OpenAI partnership, announced in early March, commits to ensuring the construction of AI infrastructure supports union careers, strengthens registered apprenticeship programs and creates economic opportunity in the communities where the work is done.
• McGarvey also called on Congress — across both parties — and the Trump Administration to urgently develop a federal plan to protect and transition workers who face job displacement as artificial intelligence reshapes the broader economy.

Building Trades Descend on Washington for Annual Legislative Conference

Every spring, the affiliates that make up the North American Building Trades Unions send delegates to Washington D.C., to rally together and lobby their elected officials. NABTU President Sean McGarvey told America’s Work Force Union Podcast that the opening day of the annual Legislative Conference at the Washington Hilton drew more than 3,000 delegates from all 50 states — national, state and Local building trades leaders alongside industry partners, contractors and clients.

McGarvey described the conference as a rite of spring for the building trades, a week that combines plenary sessions with a roster of bipartisan speakers, afternoon workshops and a lobby day on Capitol Hill. Attendees fan out across the city to meet with elected officials and agency leaders whose decisions directly shape the construction industry and the workers who power it.

The speaker lineup this year includes Democratic and Republican elected officials, reflecting a deliberate commitment to working across party lines. McGarvey also highlighted a town hall format featuring members who have run for or currently hold elected office, part of an ongoing effort to encourage more building trades members to take active roles in civic and political life.

What NABTU Is Asking Washington to Protect in 2026

McGarvey was direct about what the building trades need from this Congress. The priorities have not changed: Davis-Bacon prevailing wage protections, sustained investment in infrastructure, a robust registered apprenticeship system and continued support for project labor agreements in both public and private construction.

He acknowledged that this Congress has been less engaged with the building trades than previous sessions, describing the current legislative environment as more challenging to navigate. But NABTU maintains strong relationships with key members in both chambers, and those relationships remain the union’s voice on Capitol Hill, he said.

McGarvey also discussed the scores of projects that had committed funding under the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act that have since been paused, pulled back or outright canceled. NABTU has engaged the courts to challenge some of those decisions, winning some cases and losing others. For the union construction workers and contractors who had been counting on those projects, the uncertainty makes long-range planning extremely difficult, he said.

Record Apprenticeship Growth Despite Disruption

Despite the policy headwinds, the pipeline of workers entering the trades has never been stronger. McGarvey said NABTU affiliates currently have more than 300,000 workers enrolled in their registered apprenticeship programs across all crafts, with 88,000 new entrants in 2025 alone. The union added more than 47,000 net new members across 14 crafts last year, following 100,000 net new members in 2023 and 2024 combined.

He pushed back on the narrative that the trades face a worker shortage. He referenced IBEW Local 26 as one example. The union’s jurisdiction covers Washington, D.C., northern Virginia and the surrounding region. It received 5,000 applications for its most recent apprenticeship class and accepted 880. The demand, McGarvey said, is there. The question is whether there is a pipeline of committed work to justify training more people.

That dynamic, he argued, comes down to timing. The building trades do not train workers for jobs that do not exist. When a client commits early — meaning years before shovels hit the ground — the trades can align their workforce development plans accordingly. McGarvey pointed to long-term relationships with clients such as the TVA, Southern Company and Constellation in the power generation sector as models of what that kind of partnership looks like in practice. Those clients share 10-year capital investment and maintenance plans with NABTU, allowing affiliated unions to recruit and prepare a locally based workforce well in advance.

The problem, he said, is that too many new entrants to the construction industry — particularly in technology-driven sectors — make their labor strategy decisions last, after engineering, financing and permitting are already well underway. That late engagement makes workforce procurement far harder and less reliable.

NABTU and OpenAI: Building the Infrastructure of the Future Together

The partnership between NABTU and OpenAI, announced in early March, is the most visible expression of McGarvey’s argument that the building trades belong at the center of the AI economy..

McGarvey said OpenAI approached NABTU based on its existing track record, including a memorandum of understanding already in place with Microsoft. OpenAI recognized that NABTU oversees the world's largest construction workforce development program and that data centers are labor-intensive projects that require deep craft skills. But he said the partnership goes beyond putting boots on the ground.

Building trades members live in the communities where these projects are built. They are known there as coaches, volunteers and neighbors whose families, in some cases, have worked in the trades for generations. That community standing, McGarvey argued, is something no outside contractor can replicate. When a data center or a power facility needs local approval from counties and townships, having the building trades as a trusted voice in those conversations dramatically improves the chances of a project moving forward.

The structure of the partnership mirrors NABTU’s arrangement with Microsoft: a national committee with representatives from across the crafts working alongside OpenAI counterparts to assess projects geographically, evaluate local workforce capacity, map on-ramp pathways through apprenticeship-readiness programs, and build project-by-project workforce plans. OpenAI’s original commitment called for investing $500 billion in AI infrastructure — a figure McGarvey described as an enormous undertaking that will require a large workforce to build.

AI Is Coming — and Workers Need a Federal Plan

McGarvey did not minimize the anxiety that many workers feel about artificial intelligence. AI will cause disruption, he said, but the disruption will hit white-collar workers harder than blue-collar workers, at least in the near term. The physical work of building, maintaining and powering AI infrastructure cannot be automated away.

What concerns McGarvey more than the disruption itself is the absence of a plan to manage it. He said he is not aware of any bipartisan working group in Washington actively developing a long-term federal strategy to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI — and he called that gap unacceptable.

His message to policymakers on both sides of the aisle was clear: the fights of the moment are real, but this is a long-range challenge that requires a long-range answer. Workers and their families need to know that if their occupation is eliminated by technological change, there is a transition path waiting for them — into new industries, into the trades, into careers that can sustain a middle-class life. That plan, McGarvey said, needs to be developed now, not after the disruption has already arrived.

The NABTU-OpenAI partnership is one piece of that answer, he said. But the broader architecture needs to come from government — and the building trades will keep pressing until it does.

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