Data centres: the cloud rises over building sites where people are afraid

According to Le Monde's economics desk, a five-month investigation led by Investigate Europe, a cross-border investigative journalism collective, with partners in nine countries including Le Monde, reveals a rise in dangerous practices on data-centre construction sites across several European countries. The newspaper's headline speaks of workers exploited "in a climate of 'terror'". Our dispatch stops there: we do not know which companies are named, which countries are most affected, or the details of the incidents. The rest is our reading, not the content of the investigation.

We can therefore, cautiously, ask the awkward question: who benefits from the building site? "Artificial intelligence" and "the cloud" are sold to us as almost meteorological phenomena, a cloud, a flow, a wave. This is textbook commodity fetishism: we speak of computing power as if it were a natural force, and the concrete, the cables and the bodies that lay them vanish from the picture. A data centre, however, does not rise into the air. It is built by people, often paid by other people, who are themselves paid by yet others.

This is where cascading subcontracting becomes an economic tool rather than a mere organisational detail. Each link takes its cut, and the pressure runs downwards, until it reaches the one who has no one left to pass it on to. The principal contractor can then say, hand on heart, that he did not know. The chain offloads risk as much as cost: if something goes wrong, it is somewhere else, with someone else.

Exploitation, in Marx's sense, does not require a sadistic boss: it arises from the fact that labour exceeds the time needed to pay the wage, and the gap becomes profit. Here, it seems, things are sliding further, towards the outright shaving of wages and safety. When the race for deadlines and margins plays out in a sector swollen by colossal investment, labour becomes the most docile variable to adjust.

Docile on one condition: that fear circulates. The word "terror" used by Le Monde points to what Marx called the reserve army of labour: a pool of precarious workers, often foreign to the country or region of the site, who can be replaced by tomorrow morning. Someone who knows he is interchangeable hesitates to report a bare cable or a missing wage. We do not yet know who these workers are; their legal status will be decisive.

What remains is to see what the authorities, the labour inspectorates and the big groups commissioning the work will do, and the investigation will no doubt tell us more than our summary. One thing is certain: the "cloud" has foundations, and it would be only good manners for those who pour them to get home in one piece, and paid.