Project 2025 is a 900+ page wish list of right-wing proposals to push human rights back to the 1920s when workers had no rights bosses were legally obliged to respect, Black people in the South couldn’t vote, and women had no right to contraception.
Much of what Project 2025 proposes, like mass deportations and outlawing certain forms of birth control, has been widely publicized and generated public outrage. However, Project 2025 also contains proposals that would sharply curtail workers’ legal rights on the job, and these deserve more attention than they are getting.
- Project 2025 proposes (p. 587-592) to allow bosses to substitute paid time off at straight time pay instead of time and a-half pay when requiring workers to work more than 40 hours a week. The boss, not the worker, would control when the worker could use the paid time off.
- Right now, overtime pay kicks in after 40 hours per week. Project 2025 would exempt the boss from paying overtime unless he required workers to work more than 80 hours in two weeks, meaning that he might make you work 50 hours in one week and if he cuts your hours the next week to 30, you wouldn’t get any overtime pay at all.
- Project 2025 recommends that Congress pass legislation allowing states to exempt bosses in those states from observing minimum wage laws and other workplace rules set by the federal government. (p. 605)
- It urges an incoming Trump administration to appoint right-wing officials to agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Labor Relations Board, whose primary qualification is not their expertise but rather their eagerness to restrict the power of these agencies to help workers. (p. 886 and 615)
Project 2025 has a series of proposals to make it harder for workers to form unions and making it harder for unions to be effective. Its authors recommend:
- Making it easier for bosses to fire workers for working together to improve conditions on the job, or to form unions at all by restricting the scope of workers’ activity on the job which the National Labor Relations Act legally protects. (p. 601)
- Changing the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) so that bosses could demand contractual concessions from the union if the workers want to be covered by U.S. laws that guarantee basic standards, such as OSHA safety rules and Fair Labor Standards Act rules on overtime pay.
- Amending the NLRA to permit the boss to establish and control employee organizations in the workplace. These organizations would not give the workers any power to change anything, but they would be an obstacle to forming real unions that are independent of the boss. In practice, these would be company unions. (p. 599)
- Enlarge the size of so-called “small businesses” at which workers don’t have legal protection for organizing unions. (p. 594)
- Allowing big corporations that control sub-contractors who hire workers to perform services for the big corporations to avoid having to bargain with these workers over wages and conditions when they (form a union. (p. 591)
Project 2025 introduces other, more drastic right-wing proposals to gut legal support for unions. One proposal would do away with the Bacon-Davis Act and U.S. government rules that require non-union contractors to adhere to union wage and benefit standards on multi-year federally funded construction projects (Project Labor Agreements). These proposals would be a significant blow to construction unions, which depend on these rules to weaken the attacks on wages from non-union contractors. (p. 604)
Project 2025 also addresses another far-right anti-union proposal, the Worker Free Choice Act. Right now, when a majority of workers in a workplace vote for union recognition, by law, the union that wins the election has the power and the obligation to represent all the workers. In right-to-work states, workers can drop out of the union, but the contract the union negotiates still covers them. For example, if the contract says seniority governs when you can change shifts or departments or choose when to use your vacation time, then the boss must treat both non-union and union members equally. This requirement makes it hard for the boss to play off the non-union workers against the union members because it forbids him from rewarding non-union workers with privileges like first choice of vacations ahead of higher seniority workers. Under the Worker Free Choice Act, the boss would have a free hand to play off non-union and union members against each other, by giving privileges to non-union workers that go against provisions of the contract. (p. 599)
Some of the authors of Project 2025 say they think “it would be a mistake to antagonize unions’ core interests.” Proposals to abolish Bacon-Davis and Project Labor Agreements would hit the better-paid members of construction unions hard. Trump has considerable support from workers in these trades, which is perhaps the reason for this caution. However, perhaps implicit in this advice is a recognition that if the far-right corporations aggressively attack union rights, the resistance might be greater than the bosses anticipated. (p. 603)
Regardless of the hesitations of some of Project 2025’s authors about antagonizing unions, a full-scale attack on the legal recognition of workers and unions is already underway. Space X, one of Elon Musk’s corporations, wants the Supreme Court to declare that the entire labor law system for enforcing workers’ legal rights, which is already weak, is unconstitutional. Starbucks and Amazon, facing union organizing drives, have taken the same position. Trump made it clear in his interview with Musk on X (Twitter) that he agrees with Elon that bosses should be free to fire workers who go on strike. This attitude is nothing new with bosses and right-wing politicians; Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981. The bosses’ attacks on workers’ rights have only built up since then. Many of them hope that now, with the help of a second Trump administration and the right-wing Supreme Court judges, they can finish the job.
Democratic party politicians, of course, say they oppose all that. But when they controlled both the White House and the Congress, they didn’t actually pass any laws, like the Pro Act, which would protect and extend workers’ legal right to organize and strike. That’s largely because they haven’t felt the pressure of a sustained worker led movement.
U.S. history in the 1930s proves that laws recognizing workers’ rights to organize and strike were passed only after masses of workers went into the streets or sat down and occupied the factories, defying the unjust laws, the courts and the police that tried to stop them.
Over the last fifty years, the bosses have forgotten what an aroused working class can do. It’s past time we taught them this lesson again. But to do that, we will have to get organized. And when we do that, we can not only defend our rights on the job, we can change the whole society.