Project 2025: Eviscerate overtime and dismantle pro-worker regulations

One central proposal in Mandate that illuminates Project 2025’s extreme anti-work posture is the suggestion that employers should be allowed to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay. The attacks on overtime take several forms, including a proposal to allow workers to accrue vacation instead of time-and-a-half compensation — but at least 40 percent of lower- and middle-income workers already don’t use their allotted paid time off. Under this policy employers could coerce workers into “voluntarily” selecting vacation that they’re either formally or informally prohibited from taking, thereby denying them overtime compensation.

Project 2025 further recommends that workers and bosses agree to extend the overtime threshold to a period of two weeks or one month. The policy would empower management to overload busy weeks with extra-long shifts and take advantage of slow periods through under-scheduling — effectively eliminating overtime altogether.

Another related attack on overtime comes in the form of allowing workers to negotiate away national employment law rights like time-and-a-half pay in exchange for noncompensation benefits like “predictable scheduling.” Such a change could incentivize predatory scheduling practices in order to coerce workers to give up overtime. If that’s not enough, Mandate also suggests returning to a Trump-era regulation that would deny overtime to most employees making more than $679 per week or $35,000 annually, which would leave behind millions of workers.

At virtually every turn, Mandate for Leadership stacks the deck against workers, including opening up young people to exploitation in dangerous jobs.

• It seeks to revert to a Trump-era law that allows employers to categorize workers as independent contractors, thus denying them benefits and legal protections extended to employees.
• It significantly dismantles safety protections for workers by directing Congress and the Department of Labor to “exempt small business, first-time, non-willful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.”
• It argues that due to “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” with “parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.” This proposal is even more alarming when paired with Mandate’s call to exempt states from the FLSA, which governs child labor laws.

Despite a superficial concern for workers from the MAGA movement, Project 2025’s recommendations would be disastrous for the working class and a boon to economic elites.

A return to company unionism

Project 2025 seeks to roll back New Deal-era labor victories by proposing that Congress “pass legislation allowing waivers from federal labor laws” — like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act — “under certain conditions.” Allowing state-level exemptions to the NLRA and FLSA would almost certainly trigger a race-to-the-bottom dynamic, where firms relocate to states with the weakest (or nonexistent) labor protections at the expense of workers. That’s what happened in states that passed so-called “right-to-work” laws — which starve unions of resources by preventing them from collecting fees from all employees they represent, thereby creating a free-rider problem — where employers were able to depress wages and union membership.

Unions have made significant gains under the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labor law and investigates anti-union practices. That progress is largely thanks to NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has taken an aggressive, pro-worker enforcement posture. Project 2025 promises to fire her on “Day One.” It also calls for reductions in the budgets of the NLRB and the Department of Labor to the “low end of the historical average,” as well as implementing a “hiring freeze for career officials.”

Mandate’s anti-unionism extends beyond funding cuts and a personnel freeze to attack unions at their core — most significantly, by suggesting that Congress “pass labor reforms that create non-union ‘employee involvement organizations.’” Although Mandate offers few details on what purpose these EIOs would serve, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) proposed similar legislation in 2022; his bill makes it explicit that these organizations “are not unions and ‘cannot enter into collective bargaining agreements.’” EIOs would signal a return to the days of company unionism, stripping power from workers by providing employers with what pro-labor think tank the People’s Policy Project calls “another union avoidance tool” and diluting the membership and voting power of actual unions. Like in Rubio’s bill, Mandate’s EIOs would place a “a non-voting, supervisory member” on the board of directors at large, publicly traded companies — an entirely powerless role incapable of advancing workers’ interests.

Project 2025 would further undermine unions by eliminating “card check” — where a majority of workers who have signed union authorization forms can ask their employer for voluntary recognition — and mandating “the secret ballot exclusively.” Although the idea of a secret ballot has the veneer of democracy, in practice it’s a power grab for management. By forcing organizers to go through the byzantine NLRB election process, an employer can buy itself time to wage an anti-union campaign and bog down the process, often through illegal means. A 2019 study found that employers violated labor laws in 41.5% of NLRB-supervised union elections in 2016 and 2017 and intimidated or coerced workers in nearly a third of all elections.

The structural power imbalance is exacerbated by the huge discrepancy in resources between the parties. Every year, employers spend more than $400 million just on consultants in their attempts to thwart union drives. When coupled with anti-worker harassment, that’s money well spent from the point of view of management. A 2022 study found that union elections through the NLRB were successful “in less than 10% of cases where the employer resists the organizing effort to the point that an unfair labor practice charge is filed.”

In 2023, the NLRB under Abruzzo provided unions with a major win by ruling that if an employer is found to have violated labor law during the course of an election campaign, it must immediately recognize the union — without requiring an election — and move to contract negotiations. Mandate would reverse that ruling.

Mandate additionally looks to roll back Biden administration NLRB protections for “protected concerted activity” — that is, actions workers take to better their working conditions, even outside of attempts to form a union. Project 2025 looks to return to the Trump administration’s interpretation, which took a very narrow view of what was protected and opened up workers to retaliation from their bosses for actions like discussing workplace safety concerns with fellow workers.

Project 2025’s war on organized labor in its own words

• Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “Congress should rescind the federal charter of the National Education Association—the only union that enjoys a federal charter—no longer putting the federal imprimatur of support on the special interest group.” [Heritage.org, 1/9/24]
• Jonathan Berry, author of the labor chapter in Mandate, writing at American Compass: “In practice, modern unions in the American private sector are beset by serious agency problems that limit their effectiveness as institutions for individual workers to share in the common good.” [American Compass, accessed 7/9/24]
• The Heritage Foundation budget blueprint for fiscal years 2023: “The Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau should be eliminated.” [Heritage.org, 2022]
• Heritage: “How to Close Down the Department of Labor.” [Heritage.org, 10/19/95]
• War Room host and key booster of Project 2025 Steve Bannon: “If Nevada is Close They Will Steal it with the Culinary Union.” [Gettr, 3/21/24; Media Matters, 11/9/23]
• Stephen Moore, Heritage Foundation fellow: “Why Every State Should Guarantee the Right to Work.” [Heritage.org, 7/17/2014]
• Claremont Review of Books, a media outlet affiliated with Project 2025 advisory board member the right-wing Claremont Institute: “Right-to-work laws make it easier for states to attract businesses, because many companies prefer to locate in right-to-work states, believing that unions not only drive up costs but reduce productivity with baroque work rules and adversarial stances.” [Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015]

Go deeper into Project 2025’s attacks on workers

• Jonathan Berry, author of Mandate’s chapter on labor, was a top official in the Labor Department under Trump — which was catastrophic for workers. Trump’s labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, was a “wrecking ball aimed at workers” who had spent decades in his career as a lawyer “helping corporations gut or evade government regulations, including worker protections.” During Scalia’s tenure, with Berry “overseeing all aspects of rulemaking and policy development,” millions of workers were denied overtime benefits. [The New Yorker, 10/19/20; Economic Policy Institute, 9/24/19; Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
• Unions are building power in the United States, but Project 2025 would likely curtail the National Labor Relations Board’s progress. A June study found that “workers today have a better chance of winning their union representation election than at any point in the past 15 years, with a win rate of more than 70 percent.” Project 2025’s promise to remove NLRB General Counsel Abruzzo, alongside its other anti-union proposals, would likely halt those gains and result in fewer employers being held accountable for their anti-worker, law-breaking tactics. [Center for American Progress, 6/20/24]
• Mandate for Leadership’s policies could allow firms to discriminate against LGBTQ communities while at work. The guidebook recommends restricting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County — which extended civil rights protections to gay and trans people — to apply only to hiring and firing decisions. Other types of workplace discrimination, such as enforcing dress codes or denying workers access to a bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, would theoretically be permitted under this regulatory regime. [GLAAD, 6/24/24; Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
• Project 2025 further opens the door to workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people by pushing a false definition of so-called “biological binary” sex. “The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc,” the book states, adding: “The President should direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” [Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
• Like other sections of the document, the chapter on labor takes aim at abortion rights. It argues that Congress and the Department of Labor should “clarify” that states have the power to “to restrict abortion, surrogacy, or other anti-life [employee] ‘benefits.’” [Mandate for Leadership, 2023]