10 ways Project 2025 could make your job worse

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.