Virginia's most senior state senator, the same lawmaker who authored a $15 minimum wage bill, publicly criticized data centers for paying construction workers six-figure salaries, a contradiction that lays bare the selective logic behind progressive labor politics.
State Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate, used a Wednesday legislative hearing to argue that data centers are harming the state by offering construction workers between $100,000 and $250,000 a year. The wages, she said, are draining labor from residential housing projects. No one on the panel answered her complaint, and the chairman promised to track down someone who could.
Lucas sits as vice chair of a bicameral panel convened to study data centers, their environmental footprint, and the tax breaks they receive. Wednesday's session was the first of several hearings that will shape how Virginia implements a new consumption tax on data center energy use, a levy projected to cost the industry roughly $600 million a year. But Lucas steered the conversation toward wages, framing high pay for blue-collar tradesmen as a problem the state needs to solve.
Lucas sponsored SB1 during the 2026 legislative session, a bill to raise Virginia's minimum wage to $15 an hour. That measure rested on a straightforward progressive premise: workers deserve higher pay, and the state should mandate it. Yet at Wednesday's hearing, the Washington Free Beacon reported, Lucas objected when the free market delivered exactly what minimum-wage advocates say they want, substantially higher wages for working people.
Lucas told the panel:
"That's because the data centers seem to be swallowing up all of the labor force by paying $100,000 to $250,000 a year to get these data centers built. So, where are the employees to help with our residential construction sites and things like that?"
She also asked whether there were "any concerns to employment in other construction fields, especially if we're trying to build residential housing." Panel chairman Luke Torian, a fellow Democrat and Virginia delegate, said he would "find someone" to field her questions after no witnesses at the hearing addressed them.
Lucas's office did not respond to a request for comment about the tension between her minimum-wage advocacy and her complaint about high construction wages.
The industry Lucas targeted has been one of Virginia's biggest economic engines. A 2023 study by JLARC, the state's nonpartisan Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which conducts oversight studies for the legislature, found that data centers created tens of thousands of jobs, generated $5.5 billion in labor income, and contributed $9.1 billion to the state's gross domestic product.
Loudoun County, northwest of Washington, D.C., has earned the nickname "Data Center Alley" for the concentration of facilities there. Local governments in the county cut property tax rates by as much as 40 percent over the last decade, bankrolled by the tax revenue data centers generated. Residents in those communities got a direct benefit: lower property taxes funded by private-sector investment.
None of that has satisfied Lucas. In a Facebook video posted in July, she called data centers freeloaders:
"It's time to get our heads out of the sand. Data centers are growing. Their profits are growing. And the burden on Virginia families is growing right along with them. That's not a fair deal. That's freeloading. We made progress this year. But I won't stop fighting until data centers pay their fair share."
Governor Abigail Spanberger, also a Democrat, signed Virginia's biennial budget in June 2026. That package included a first-of-its-kind consumption tax charging data centers for the energy they use, a measure projected to cost operators about $600 million annually. The hearings Lucas now participates in will help determine how the state implements that tax.
Two of the nation's largest construction trade unions pushed back against the anti-data-center movement this week. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers published a statement warning that data center moratoriums "threaten to block billions of dollars in potential investment and will eliminate critical job opportunities." The United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters voiced similar opposition.
Those unions represent exactly the kind of workers earning the wages Lucas criticized, electricians, pipefitters, and skilled tradesmen whose paychecks depend on continued data center construction. For organized labor, the math is simple: more projects mean more jobs at high wages. Lucas, who has positioned herself as a champion of working families, found herself on the opposite side of the workers she claims to defend.
Lucas also sponsored SB835 this session, creating a $97.7 million state fund to attract high-tech rocket manufacturers to Virginia. She wrote that the fund would bring at least 1,546 new jobs. In other words, Lucas is willing to spend nearly $100 million in taxpayer money to lure one industry, while complaining that another industry showed up on its own and started writing big checks to construction crews without any state subsidy at all.
At the close of her remarks, Lucas made clear she has no plans to soften her stance. "I don't intend to back down on this issue," she told the panel. More hearings are expected, though specific dates have not been announced.
The core question Lucas never answered, and no one on the panel pressed her to answer, is how a lawmaker can champion a mandatory wage floor in one bill and then object when private employers voluntarily pay workers several times that amount. The $15 minimum wage says workers deserve more. The complaint about $100,000 salaries says they're getting too much. Both positions carry Lucas's name.
When the government mandates higher pay, progressive lawmakers call it justice. When the market delivers it on its own, apparently it's a crisis.
