Two conversations that cut to the heart of what workers are facing right now — one on the fight to lift airport workers out of poverty wages today and one on what AI and quantum computing are doing to skilled work tomorrow.

32BJ SEIU Executive Vice President Jaime Contreras discusses the campaign to amend the Secure Maryland Wage Act to raise wages, secure employer-paid healthcare and establish paid time off for more than 1,000 airline-contracted workers at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport who currently earn $17 an hour with no healthcare benefits, while comparable airports in New York, Boston and Philadelphia already pay wages in the $20 range with healthcare and paid time off. Governor Wes Moore has committed to emergency legislation in the upcoming Maryland session. Contreras also shares his own story: from undocumented teenager fleeing El Salvador's civil war in 1988, to US Navy veteran, to citizen in 1996, to leader of a 195,000-member union that runs its own legal fund to cover every cost for green card holders seeking citizenship.

Then, IAM retired International President Tom Buffenbarger shares what an internationally recognized architect told him on the drive to the IAM Kentucky State Council meeting: that AI and quantum computing have compressed 18 to 24 months of architectural design work into five minutes, that contractors are beginning to bypass architects entirely and that the profession is going away. Tennessee Valley Authority members at the same meeting described new manufacturing plant designs that are eliminating cafeterias, break rooms and parking lots because the future those plants are designed for has very few human workers in it. And they described a coming return to nuclear energy — with a wave of construction jobs followed by facilities that will need almost no one to operate — as the practical answer to the electricity demands that AI infrastructure is generating.

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