John Deere makes tractors. Caterpillar makes bulldozers. Neither company has anything to do with artificial intelligence, or so you'd think. Turns out, when you need to physically build a data center in the middle of nowhere, someone has to bring the heavy machinery. That someone is getting very, very rich. And now the UAW wants to talk about it.
The AI Boom Has a Dirty Secret: It Runs on Bulldozers
Here's a detail that doesn't make it into the breathless tech coverage: the AI gold rush is also a construction gold rush. According to Axios, data center developers have been snapping up excavators, bulldozers, and construction equipment at a pace that has genuinely surprised old-school industrial manufacturers like Deere and Caterpillar.
Those companies, which have spent decades being described as boring, cyclical, rust-belt-adjacent businesses, are suddenly riding a stock and sales boom with serious Silicon Valley energy. Deere's investors are thrilled. The workers building the machines that build the data centers? Still waiting for their cut.
Shawn Fain Has Entered the Chat
UAW President Shawn Fain, who made his name by leading the historic 2023 strike against the Big Three automakers and winning, is not the kind of guy who watches a profit surge and stays quiet about it. He has already been publicly agitating against AI giants, calling for labor protections and drawing a very clean line. As Axios reports, Fain's position is: "You're either with workers or you're with millionaires."
That's not rhetorical throat-clearing. That's a negotiating posture, and Deere should recognize it. Fain pulled the same move in 2023, turned up the heat slowly, and then walked his members out the door at the exact moment it would hurt most. He knows how to read leverage, and right now, Deere's leverage is at an unusual high. Which, if you know anything about labor negotiations, means Fain's leverage is too.
When a company is printing money, unions have the best argument they'll ever have for a bigger share. The workers are still there. The profits are real. The question is whether management will share voluntarily or wait to get dragged.
What 'Barreling Toward a Contract Clash' Actually Means
Axios describes the UAW and Deere as "barreling toward a contract clash." That's a polite way of saying both sides are currently on a collision course and neither one has hit the brakes.
Deere's current UAW contract will expire, talks will begin, and the company will almost certainly open by insisting that its recent good fortune is complicated, cyclical, tied to factors beyond their control, and definitely not a reason to dramatically increase labor costs. That's the script. They always use the script. Meanwhile, Fain will walk in with stock charts and profit statements and ask, very pointedly, why the people who make the machines aren't seeing any of this.
It is not a subtle argument. But subtle arguments don't win contracts. Strikes do.
The Larger War Over Who Gets Paid in the AI Economy
Zoom out for a second. This Deere fight isn't happening in isolation. The UAW, the Teamsters, and a growing coalition of labor groups have spent the past two years watching the AI economy create staggering wealth at the top while labor's share of that wealth remains roughly where it was before the boom started.
Fain's framing, that you are either with workers or with millionaires, is deliberately designed to make fence-sitting impossible. Every executive, politician, and board member who praises AI's economic potential now has to answer a follow-up question: potential for whom? The tech CEO whose company just added fifty billion in market cap? Or the guy running the CNC machine in the Deere factory in Moline, Illinois?
The UAW is betting that the public, which has spent three years watching billionaires get fabulously richer while groceries stayed expensive, is ready to take a side. That's not obviously a bad bet.
Deere's Position: Currently Very Good, About to Get Complicated
From Deere's perspective, the timing of this contract fight is genuinely unfortunate. The company would love to enjoy its AI-adjacent sales boom without having to explain to labor negotiators why that boom hasn't trickled down yet. That is not going to happen.
Deere has been through UAW fights before. In 2021, roughly 10,000 Deere workers went on strike for five weeks and came away with a 10 percent immediate pay raise plus additional increases over the life of the contract. Deere eventually settled, and the company kept right on being profitable. The sky did not fall. It rarely does when companies that are actually doing well pay their workers more. But the negotiations were ugly, and this time, Fain is coming in with considerably more experience and a much clearer public narrative to work with.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the AI economy is so new, so different, so fundamentally unlike every other technological revolution in history, that the normal rules about who gets rich don't apply yet. We're still figuring it out. We need to let the value accrue at the top first and then it'll trickle down eventually, trust us. John Deere's stock chart would like a word.
This is the same argument that got made during the railroad boom, the auto boom, the tech boom of the nineties, and every other moment when a small group of people got fabulously wealthy off a wave of economic change and then acted surprised when the people doing the actual physical work asked for a raise. It never gets less insulting. The AI version is particularly rich, given that the entire pitch of AI is that it's going to replace workers. Telling those same workers to be patient while their employers cash in is not a great look.
Fain's line, workers versus millionaires, is blunt to the point of being almost too clean. But clean arguments cut through noise. Deere's executives will spend the next several months generating a tremendous amount of noise. The workers on the line have already heard all of it before.
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