How Project 2025 Targets Workers and Endangers Kids
Union-busting, dangerous jobs, and courts tilted for bosses
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.
Tonight we have our second piece on Project 2025, the far-right’s plan to mount a hostile takeover of the United States government.
There’s been a real uptick in national attention on the plan, but it’s mostly focused on the politicization of the civil service and the usual issues that the Biden campaign tends to tout. But Project 2025 is less a political document than a detailed instruction manual for a top-to-bottom Christofascist takeover of government and American society, each step designed to impose a depraved ideology or punish some segment of the populace.
This new series digs into the buried elements of Project 2025 that would have a direct, outsized impact on working people. This is Part I and Part II of our newly-completed deep dive into the plan’s assault on labor rights and working class people. Please share it with everybody you can.
I’ll be back later this weekend with a big breakdown of the week’s key ballot initiative updates, policy wins, economic shockers, and election news from around the country.
Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.
How Project 2025 would screw workers: A full review
By and large, Project 2025’s vision for workers’ rights is exactly what you’d expect from a right-wing think tank funded by conservative billionaires. It’s got it all: attacks on union organizing, the dismantling of regulations guiding workplace safety, and an injection of the latest culture war terms and bigotries into the attempts to rollback civil rights at work.
Like much of the rest of Project 2025, each section of the chapter on labor is heavy on technical jargon and frequently references specialized rules and the administrative law cases that produced them. It’s niche stuff, but it also impacts a vast majority of Americans.
Exploitation and endangerment
Frustrated by the leverage that workers held after the first year of the pandemic and desperate to avoid having to pay significantly higher wages, corporate America and its lobbyists went on the offensive to restore imbalance to the job market.
Lobbyists first convinced Republican-controlled states to curtail extended unemployment benefits, then business owners began attempting to undercut returning workers by hiring children in low-wage and dangerous jobs. Industry groups were successful in convincing a number of states — including Iowa, Arkansas, and Florida — to roll back century-old child labor protections, mostly as a way to legalize some of the horrible practices that they’d adopted.
Project 2025 wants to upsize the return to Depression-era child labor law, starting with some of the most dangerous jobs. Here’s what the plan suggests:
Amend Hazard-Order Regulations. Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.
With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations. This would give a green light to training programs and build skills in teenagers who may want to work in these fields.
DOL should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.
The document’s depiction of how these scenarios play out is deeply cynical and far from the reality. Most young people who work in dangerous jobs in factories, mills, and restaurants are actually poor migrants who are exploited by employers, staffing firms, and “sponsors” who put them in harm’s way. There tends to be little training and no real safety protocol, and until last year, OSHA had largely overlooked these violations, which led to record enforcement in 2023.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 would clear the way for increased exploitation of young, poor workers, put them in danger, and drive down wages for everybody else.
Collective bargaining and worker voice
Conservatives have been at war against the NLRB since it was created by the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. Their ongoing assault has taken many forms, including corporate union-busting, anti-worker laws, and a systemic chipping away at the NLRA. In this section, the authors of Project 2025 recommend repealing parts of the landmark act as well as reversing rulings made by the board to protect workers.
The first priority it lays out is designed to change 90 years of precedent in order to undermine unions by allowing for the creation of “employee involvement organizations.”
Congress should reintroduce and pass the Teamwork for Employees and Managers (TEAM) Act of 2022:
Reforms the National Labor Relations Act’s (NLRA) Section 8(a)(2) prohibition on formal worker–management cooperative organizations like works councils.
Creates an “Employee Involvement Organization” (EIO) to facilitate voluntary cooperation on critical issues like working conditions, benefits, and productivity.
The NLRA bans non-union worker organizations that are “dominated” by employers, which give the illusion of worker representation but does not give them an independent voice or advocate. Simply put, you can’t truly negotiate with or push back against your boss when you’re represented by somebody who works for that boss.
Conservatives have been trying to pass a version of the TEAM Act since 1995, after a major NLRB decision issued in 1992 found that a company called Electromation violated the law organizing workers by starting a “company union” violated the NLRA. The 2022 version of the bill allowed companies to create new organizations, but there’s functionally no difference so long as the employer is in control.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 would allow employers to start fake unions that trick workers into giving up their rights and protections.
Technically speaking, the National Labor Relations Act prohibits employers from interfering with or punishing workers for organizing unions in their workplace. That’s never really stopped employers from doing it anyway, and whether the government bothers to hold them to account depends on exactly what it considers protected activity and what actions it believes constitute interference.
Last fall, the NLRB broadened the definition of what is considered protected activity and what would be considered interfering with it. Here’s what Project 2025 would do about that:
“Reverse unreasonable interpretations of ‘protected concerted activity.’ The NLRB should return to the 2019 Alstate Maintenance interpretation of what does and does not constitute protected concerted activity, including listing eight instances of lawful actions by employers.”
The 2019 Alstate Maintenance decision ruled that an individual worker should not be granted protection for issuing a complaint, even when it is made in front and on behalf of co-workers. Instead, the Trump-era board considered that “a mere gripe” and created a narrow list of circumstances in which actions that could be considered interference.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 would give employers far more leeway to fire workers for standing up for their rights.
The NLRA allows for a few different ways for workers to form a union. It almost always begins with collecting signed cards that indicate interest in unionizing. If workers can get at least 30% of their colleagues to sign union cards, they are eligible for a union election. If they can get signatures from just above 50% of their colleagues, employers can voluntarily recognize the union without going through with the election.
The latter option is what’s known as “card check,” and for years, unions have been pushing for a law that would make it mandatory for employers to recognize a union at that 50% plus one threshold, as it would severely curtail union-busting. The closest they’ve come is the NLRB’s new Cemex decision, which was issued last summer and requires employers to recognize a union if workers reach that majority threshold and then management gets caught trying to interfere with an election.
Overturning that decision is just the start of the right’s plan. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to pass a law disregarding “card checks entirely, forcing every organizing unit to go through a fraught election process to unionize.
Mandating elections and narrowing the definition of union-busting would together give employers virtually free reign to make unionizing a miserable and dangerous experience.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 would open the door to extreme union-busting with zero consequences, severely reducing the number of workers that organize.
Bargaining for a contract
The only thing harder than winning a union election is actually getting an employer to agree to a fair first contract. Negotiations between management and newly certified unions now take an average of 465 days, and in some cases, it takes far longer — the first Starbucks unionized in late 2021 and it took 400+ more stores and mass public pressure to get the coffee monolith to come to the table more than two years later. (Both sides are hoping to reach an agreement by the end of 2024.) In many cases, especially vicious companies can wait out a union until its members quit.
All of this is to say that unions rarely have much bargaining power when it comes to negotiating a first contract, and in the age of automation, free trade, and local outsourcing, even many established unions lack leverage. That’s not enough for the Heritage Foundation crew, who have ideas to make things even more unbalanced.
“Congress should amend the NLRA to authorize collective bargaining to treat national employment laws and regulations as negotiable defaults”
The example they offer is pretty anodyne, but companies would no doubt weaponize this opportunity in vicious ways. Every protection afforded to workers by law is one less thing they have to worry about securing in negotiations, which means that they can use their bargaining chips on securing additional rights and benefits. By making things like basic safety rules, minimum wages, and bans on child labor subject to negotiation, the authors would cripple unions’ bargaining power and give employers the chance to weaken laws exclusively for their benefit.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 recommends letting employers hold workers hostage and trash even basic safety protections.
Conservatives love transferring public wealth to private hands, which is a big part of why we’ve gone from having so many public sector jobs to running government through contractors. It’s meant the end of many pensions and steady jobs, while also undercutting the union movement.
To create solid temporary jobs and prevent tax dollars from funding the worst employers, many governments, from to municipalities and states up through the federal government, require contractors to agree to pay a fair wage, which can be determined by formula or set at a certain rate — an early Biden executive order set the minimum wage for government contractors at $15 an hour.
Naturally, Project 2025 wants to end that:
“Agencies should end all mandatory Project Labor Agreement requirements and base federal procurement decisions on the contractors that can deliver the best product at the lowest cost.”
“Congress should enact the Davis–Bacon Repeal Act and allow markets to determine market wages.”
The Davis-Bacon Act, enacted all the way back in 1931, requires contractors on public works projects funded at least in part by the federal government to pay prevailing local wage.
Conservatives aren’t waiting around for either of these policies to go national — several major preemption laws passed last year in GOP states, including Florida, prohibited local governments from requiring that contractors pay higher than the state minimum wage.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 would significantly lower pay for construction and other working class jobs by removing market-setting standards.
Overtime and benefits
There’s been a lot of back and forth on the worker classification front over the past eight years.
Confronted with the explosion of the gig economy and local outsourcing, the Trump administration’s Department of Labor frequently took the side of tech platforms and companies that utilized third-party temp worker providers.
The Biden administration’s DOL and NLRB have worked to reverse those rules and rebalance the scales where possible for exploited workers, who began to organize in earnest as the pandemic receded.
Project 2025 prescribes a reversion back to the Trump-era standards as well as other “flexibilities” for employers that would ultimately cut into workers’ earnings.
They start off with an attack on remote workers, limiting their right to overtime pay (they have to exceed 10 hours of work in a given day) and reimbursement for home office expenses.
Here are other ways they want to cheat workers:
“Congress should provide a safe harbor from employer-employee status for companies that offer independent workers access to earned benefits.”
This is essentially what Uber, Lyft, and Grubhub locked in when they spent more than $200 million to pass Prop 22 in California. It traps workers in a kind of limbo where they can pay into receiving some benefits but aren’t full-time employees, meaning that they have no access to unemployment, far fewer workplace protections, and are largely prohibited from organizing a union. Allowing employers free reign to impose this on workers is not flexibility, but cementing a second-class citizenship.
“DOL should maintain an overtime threshold that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).”
On July 1st, the Department of Labor expanded overtime protections to salaries workers who make up to $43,888 per year, with a second bump, to $58,656, scheduled for January 1st. It’s already pegged to buying power in the lowest-cost region of the country, so Project 2025 simply wants to allow regions in conservative strongholds to keep wages down going forward.
“Congress (and DOL, in its enforcement discretion) should exempt small business, first-time, non-willful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.”
After they eviscerate rules and regulations, they’ll let a majority of employers violate the remaining ones anyway.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 would more low-wage workers in a permanent underclass without the ability to make fair wages.
Equality in the workplace
The ultra-conservative Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision is likely to put all manner of Department of Labor regulations on trial, and given the makeup of the judiciary, more than a few are likely to be struck down. Project 2025 offers a road map to the regulations that they will attack, starting with civil rights protections.
Mindful of its place as a political document, the labor section leads off with rules targeting paranoid far-right fantasies. “Nondiscrimination and equality are the law; DEI is not,” the authors insist, the first of many missives against the boogeyman of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
To combat DEI, the authors recommend:
Prohibiting the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to fund all critical race theory training.
Eliminating EEOC data collection on employee race and ethnicity.
Ending “disparate impact liability,” which makes employers responsible for any policy that “encourages, entrenches, subsidizes, or results in racial discrimination.”
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 wants to stop the commission charged with enforcing non-discrimination laws from collecting data that could provide evidence of systemic discrimination. They also want to significantly narrow the definition of discrimination to further protect discriminatory employers.
Project 2025 also takes aim at protections for transgender people after the Biden administration extended Title XII to ensure that people could use bathrooms and dress in accordance with their gender. The authors want those protections for sexuality and gender to apply only to hiring and firing. To ensure that is the case, they recommend that the president:
Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.
Direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of “sex.”
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 calls for ending most protections for trans and queer people, then ignore it when employers violate the remaining protections. It also wants to give employers the right to impose religious practice on employees.
Attacks on abortion
Additionally, Project 2025 seizes on the right’s decades-long effort to recast freedom of religion as the right to exercise religion even when it violates other peoples’ rights. To do so, they call for providing employers the right to practice religion in the workplace and allowing religious organization the right to hire based on religion and other discriminatory factors.
The document contains an entire section on promoting “pro-life” policies, casting them as part of a “religious freedom” agenda. In a few cases, the project’s focus on preventing abortions winds up mandating benefits that would help working families, including incentives for employers to provide childcare.
For the most part, however, the agenda aims to limit reproductive choice, not accommodate parents. The provisions include:
Allowing states to prevent employers from providing assistance to employees who seek abortions, including insurance and travel benefits in states where reproductive care is banned
Passing a law that clarifies that no employer is required to provide any accommodations or benefits for abortion.
➡️ In summary: Project 2025 aims to extend the Dobbs decision to the workplace, interfering with a business’s decision to provide workers with benefits that allow them to legally obtain an abortion.
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