How Project 2025 could impact workers across the country

As the final stretch of election season gets underway, we’ll be unpacking one of the more prominent storylines from the 2024 presidential race: Project 2025. 

Despite being supposedly denounced by former President Donald Trump, the Project 2025 manifesto was crafted by a number of allies who were key to his first term. Over the next three weeks, The Lede will be analyzing how this comprehensive guidebook to a possible Trump presidency will impact key aspects of American life, from reproductive rights and labor to housing and immigration policy. 

Today, we’re diving into how Project 2025 will harm workers’ rights and trade unions. 

Despite efforts by the Trump campaign to paint itself as a pro-worker platform, at the heart of the Project 2025 agenda is a plan to fundamentally alter labor rights. And it all starts with its efforts to consolidate state power within the executive branch — undermining the other sectors of government that prevent absolute power. 

“It sets up this vision of we’re going to suck all this power out of the federal government, and we’re going to put it into the president and then the president is going to do all these great things and then return power to the public,” James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, said in a recent interview with The Nation’s Laura Flanders and Maximillian Alvarez. 

“What it doesn’t answer is, what power gets returned to the public? What happens if the president doesn’t return that power, and who gets it? In theory, the power that’s being returned is this new Christian nationalist vision of social hierarchy within the United States.”

This would affect labor by eroding the ability of federal agencies to enforce laws that safeguard workers’ rights and the benefits they pay into.

For example, because Project 2025 seeks to subvert the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it would be much easier for employers to discriminate against women, workers of color and the disabled. And this framework would also bleed into other civil rights that are connected to working conditions like the right to organize a union. 

According to the AFL-CIO, Project 2025 would unwind the National Labor Review Board’s (NLRB) capacity to ensure workers can voluntarily form unions without employers interference, which it says allows employers to punish workers who want to form a union by redefining “‘protected concerted activity’ so that workers will be less protected from retaliation when they engage in union organizing.”  

Additionally, in its quest to diminish the functions of the government more broadly, Project 2025 suggests the abolition of all public-sector unions. 

On the shop floor, things become even more concerning. Disintegration of national oversight would mean that crackdown on violations of federal safety regulations would become more difficult. Project 2025 also wants to create more leniency for workers under 18 years old to participate in particularly hazardous jobs.

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs,” Project 2025 states. “With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”

Per a report published today by Governing for Impact, the Economic Policy Institute and The Child Labor Coalition, in Republican-run states where such policies have been implemented, workplace injuries involving child labor have skyrocketed — and also made the workplace more precarious for everyone on a job site. 

However, the most universal threat to workers under a hypothetical second Trump administration would be the damage done to their paycheck, from overtime laws to Social Security. Project 2025 proposes raising the retirement age for Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, dramatically altering the income of some 245 million Americans. 

“All new retirees would see their benefits cut between roughly 12.5 percent and 14.3 percent by the time the increase is fully phased in. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years, depending on when they claim Social Security,” according to the Center for American Progress. 

And while still of working age, wages could be substantially undercut by Project 2025’s call to roll back recent laws that fortify the overtime pay of some 4.3 million workers. Even more pressing, the conservative manifesto prescribes permitting employers to dictate overtime rules and authorizing states to opt out of federal overtime laws. 

Unsurprisingly, since the Project 2025 agenda is sponsored by a large constituency of pro-business organizations, the broader goal is to embolden corporate interests — and crush worker power. Don’t let the populist flourishes of the Trump-Vance campaign fool you.