Former President Donald Trump speaks at a Grand Rapids rally, July 20, 2024 | Lucy Valeski
In late August, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance told a crowd of union firefighters that he and his running mate, Donald Trump, are “the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” Trump has long claimed to champion working Americans, and Vance even walked a picket line. The Republican Party appeared to try to cozy up further to unions when it had Teamsters President Sean O’Brien speak at its national convention in July.
But those public stances and declarations stand in stark contrast with the blueprint for what Republicans want to do if and when they retake the White House. Project 2025 is an almost 900-page document laying out an agenda for the next Republican president in detail, and it lists a multitude of priorities that would, if enacted, harm workers’ pay, safety and ability to organize. Taken as a whole, the priorities the authors describe are “so unbelievably anti-union, anti-worker, anti-anybody but corporate interests,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.
When asked for an interview about the labor-related provisions, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, declined, saying, “Our chapter on that topic clearly lays out our suggested policies.” Project 2025 claims that “American workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace” and advocates for restoring “family-supporting jobs as the centerpiece of the American economy.” But to solve these issues, it attacks a “massive administrative state” and “woke nonsense” while promoting “flexibility” and “experimentation” in the laws that enshrine bedrock protections.
The spokesperson also added, “Project 2025 does not speak for President Trump or his campaign.” Trump has also recently distanced himself from the document, although at least 140 people who worked for him were involved in crafting it and Vance wrote a foreword for an upcoming book by its main architect. In 2022 Trump said Heritage was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
The document is also full of numerous labor-related ideas long espoused by the Republican Party, including many that bubbled up during the Trump administration. Even so, the laundry list of priorities would harm large numbers of workers if enacted, experts said. It’s still “shocking when you look at it compiled in its entirety,” said Lynn Rhinehart, senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s not new, but it is radical.”
Below is a list of 10 proposals from Project 2025 that labor experts say will harm working people.
1. Restricting access to overtime pay
Project 2025’s proposed changes to overtime would slash workers’ paychecks, blocking many from qualifying while introducing loopholes that would erase the time-and-a-half they’re due after working 40 hours, experts said. Project 2025 calls for rolling back the Biden administration rule that raised the salary threshold to $58,656 and expanded the protection to 4.3 million more workers. Project 2025 calls for returning to the Trump-era threshold, which would mean millions fewer workers would be eligible for overtime.
Another proposal to let employers calculate overtime over two or four weeks instead of one would significantly reduce workers’ earnings. “There’s no math where workers get paid more under this policy,” said Aaron Sojourner, senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. It also calls for letting workers trade their overtime pay for paid time off, an idea Republicans have pushed since at least 2013. While the policy is marketed as offering greater flexibility, it does not create a new leave benefit. “It’s deceitful,” Rhinehart said.
2. Eroding workplace safety
Project 2025 seeks to weaken workplace safety standards for all Americans, including teenagers. The document states, “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.” It calls on the Department of Labor to allow teenagers to work in these jobs with “proper training and parental consent.” It is “saying they want children to be less safe,” said Janelle Jones, vice president of policy and advocacy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “That is just a shocking thing to say.” And yet it’s one that hearkens back to former President Ronald Reagan’s administration, which proposed rolling back child labor protections.
It also calls for exempting small businesses, as well as first-time and “non-willful” violators, from Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fines, and to only focus safety inspections on “egregious offenders.” OSHA is already under-resourced and understaffed. Its maximum fines often amount to a slap on the wrist — $161,323 at the very most — even if a worker is severely injured or killed. In 2022, nearly 5,500 people were killed on the job and another 120,000 are estimated to have died from an illness contracted at work.
3. Allowing states to sidestep worker protections
A push to excuse states from federal labor laws could lower wages, weaken union rights and even roll back child labor standards — all in the name of what Project 2025 authors call “experimentation.” States that secured waivers from federal labor law, under their proposal, would have to ensure they do not “take away current rights held by workers or employees,” according to the document. But Rhinehart said that, without definitions, “the sky’s the limit” in terms of what worker protections states could seek to upend.
There’s already some indication of what they might try to do. Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee have all passed laws banning employers who voluntarily recognize unions from receiving state economic development funds. (Those laws could be struck down by a court because they are preempted by federal labor law, said Jennifer Sherer, acting director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network.) Since 2021, 31 states have introduced bills to weaken federal child labor laws. Five states don’t even have a minimum wage, while two have lower wages than $7.25 an hour, so the federal standard is the only way workers in those states are guaranteed at least $7.25 an hour.
4. Eliminating public sector unions
The authors question “whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place,” calling on Congress to consider whether they are allowable. These unions cover about a third of the public sector workforce, or 7 million people. Getting rid of them is “a super-radical idea,” Rhinehart said. And yet it, too, is an old idea; conservatives have long attacked them, from then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker stripping most of them of collective bargaining rights to conservatives backing the attack on public sector union dues in the Supreme Court case Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.
5. Stripping protections from misclassified workers
Project 2025 calls for rolling back a Biden administration rule that makes it easier for Uber drivers and contracted-out janitors to secure employee status, and with it, essential workplace benefits. “The entire body of labor standards and labor rights is built on the foundation of employment,” said Sojourner. Employee status ensures unemployment pay, workers’ compensation, union rights, discrimination protection, minimum wage and overtime pay, as well as oversight by OSHA. Eliminating the rule will allow corporations to treat far more workers who should be classified as employees as independent contractors, stripping them of these benefits.
6. Shielding major brands from accountability for labor violations
Project 2025 also calls for rolling back a Biden administration rule that holds some large corporations responsible for the working conditions inside franchised or contracted-out operations. Weakening the so-called “joint employer” rule would kneecap union drives among workers employed by franchises of major brands like McDonald’s and KFC. It would also block their ability to hold those brands accountable for wage theft, harassment and other violations of labor law.
7. Curtailing workers’ speech rights
One proposal would strip protections for any workers who discuss wages or complain about mistreatment — unless they complete the arduous process of forming a union. Under this provision, workers “can be fired just for the act of coming together and talking about something,” Block said. Eliminating what’s known as “protected concerted activity” is an idea that was pushed unsuccessfully by conservative groups in amicus briefs in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, the Supreme Court case that upheld arbitration agreements that bar class-action lawsuits.
8. Making it harder to win union recognition
Project 2025 wants to do away with employers’ ability to voluntarily recognize a union after a majority of workers sign cards in favor, a process commonly known as “card check.” This method offers a faster, easier way for workers to form an official union. “It’s called voluntary recognition for a reason,” said Rhinehart, emphasizing that no employer has to use it. Getting rid of it is “a very radical proposal to undermine organizing,” she said.
9. Denying labor rights to employees at small business
The document calls for exempting small businesses from oversight by labor agencies and denying small business employees the protections of the National Labor Relations Board. Given that the median union bargaining unit is just 21 workers, this would “strip millions of workers of their organizing rights,” Rhinehart said. Proposals like this have been around “for decades,” she added.
10. Weakening bedrock legal protections
The document proposes allowing unions to negotiate over existing workplace laws — such as the minimum wage and health and safety protections — instead of treating them as fixed standards. It “would put unions and workers in the position of having to bargain to hold onto their statutory rights,” Rhinehart said, sapping their ability to fight for things above and beyond those floors.
Even if there are labor rights that the agenda doesn’t specifically undo, its other proposals undermine them. The early chapters of Project 2025 call for firing many career civil servants who enforce regulations, including those that protect workers, politicizing their jobs. The authors call on the next president to fire National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo “on Day One,” someone who has overseen some of the most ambitious expansions of workers’ organizing rights in decades. It argues that the budgets for labor agencies should be significantly reduced, and Project 2025 proposes a hiring freeze for federal career officials.
Without enough manpower and financial resources, these agencies can’t enforce workers’ rights. “Even the regulations and statutes that are on the books that they don’t want to roll back almost become a dead letter,” Block noted. “The robustness of your rights are only as good as the ability of federal agencies to stick up for you.”
Under Project 2025’s agenda, “working people are really just on their own,” she added, while corporations “can pretty much do anything they want.”
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