I'd classify man camps as worse (even more bleak and dystopian than a company town).
The problem is with the quality of that accommodation.
It is also worth noting that there should not be an issue due to the fact that the accommodation provider also supplies accommodation for asylum seekers, because they should be providing acceptable accommodation to those people too.
You can probably add prisons to that list too.
Workers, immigrants, and prisoners all deserve reasonable living conditions. Why people are being housed in a place is irrelevant.
The AI link in this story seems to be simply because there are construction projects involving AI, that seems rather spurious. They wont be the first or last construction projects. Those workers deserve (and probably don't get) the support they need whether they are building a data center, a Casino, or a hospital.
Oil fields in Alberta are a very different situation than high budget AI data centers in the US.
The article and the one it links to say that the temporary housing is a perk that they’re offering to try to entice workers. It includes gyms, nice food, and activities like golf.
The comparison above to bad oil fields in Canada is arbitrary. Not all temporary housing must be like oil field accommodations in remote Canadian oil fields.
I think you're getting overly fixated on "remote Canadian" here. West Texas is plenty remote. Those temporary workers in Dickens County must far outnumber the local population. If people wanted to commute, where are they going to commute from? The closest big city is Dallas, four hours away. (Edit: I tell a lie, Lubbock is closer if that counts.)
It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a Googleplex, a cool campus where young college hires will want to come and hang out with like-minded peers (and work for long hours as a convenient side-effect). I definitely think it's going to be much more like an oil rig -- people will be paid well, and a decent amount of money will be thrown at entertainment and benefits, but fundamentally it's a place to house hundreds of men who have no reason to be there except that the work has to happen at that specific site.
This article and the linked ones specifically talk about "man camps", not even something like "company towns" where they're maybe trying to establish an actual long-term community.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA011569...
The oligarchs are the only ones fighting right now. Maybe that should change?
This is the ultimate dream of Late Stage Capitalism. The vast majority of detainees are non violent, most aren't even 'criminals' aside from overstaying a visa. There's a parallel with California's prison firefighter brigades.
In order to pay the merciful State for your own imprisonment, you shall work on the data centers. Oracle demands it. Sure on paper it's a voluntary program, but Oracle as promised better food in exchange for work .
It's not completely out of the realm of possibility for a detainees to end up manning these detention facilities as well. You'd be surprised at how many skilled workers, many of which actually have status, end up getting detained anyway.
The Hulks Act was passed in 1776.
The 13th amendment in 1865 explicitly carves it out "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime"
Anyone who studied Engineering or Computer science already knows what this is like, lol.
> Owner of ICE detention facility [...]
Oh, right, of course these things are privately owned..!
My cousin works in construction and some times gets job where the money is great but he has to drive 2 hours to the site and 2 hours home or even more. Temporary housing seems like it would be helpful while doing those jobs.
They can’t change the location of a construction site midway through building a structure.
It’s just temporary housing for construction workers.
This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil
fields.
Hell on Wheels is an American Western television series about the
construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States
[...]
chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries,
prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile
encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across
the Great Plains.
mothballed•2h ago