Project 2025 is a 920-page document offering a wide range of policy recommendations, including several bad ideas about unions and rolling back workplace protections that you should know about. The policy recommendations, put forward by mostly high-ranking former Trump administration officials, offer a look at the administration’s early priorities if President Trump were to be re-elected.
Project 2025 covers a lot of ground including retirement security, education and consumers’ rights. On unions, the authors put forward a number of ideas that would easily decimate workers’ rights, organizing rights and health and safety protections that benefit our members.
You’re not alone if you haven’t yet heard of Project 2025. According to a recent poll, around 81% of Americans know little or nothing about it.
The CliffsNotes version is that we should all be very alarmed. The scariest part: most of the directives outlined could all be accomplished through executive order without the checks and balances of Congress.
Project 2025 would have a ripple effect across our industries. To our members, safety on the job is paramount. Project 2025 takes aim at important Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws by giving small businesses that break the laws a pass. Depending on the industry and time of year, our members receive significant overtime pay, but Project 2025 repeals overtime pay guarantees and allows employers to compensate overtime hours with time off instead.
Project 2025 dedicates a significant amount of ink to outlining ways to eliminate private sector workers’ ability to join unions, allowing the use of union-busting agencies to go undisclosed, empowering employers to union bust mid-contract and allowing companies to create their own worker councils to weaken union power.
Project 2025 offers a way to ban public employees from unionizing, which would cause the UWUA to lose thousands of members. Millions of public workers across the country would lose their right to have a union and bargain about wages, benefits and working conditions
It’s a never-ending list of awful policies:
- Project 2025 exempts many employees in “small businesses” from unionizing.
- Project 2025 reduces the budget for the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor, including OSHA.
- Project 2025 fires career civil servants at the NLRB and the DOL and replaces them with anti-union right-wing hacks.
- Project 2025 misclassifies workers as independent contractors, so that they are not able to organize into unions, not subject to safety and health laws and not eligible for overtime or minimum wage.
- Project 2025 allows corporations and non-profits to set up shoddy training programs and claim that they provide the same training as union-sponsored apprenticeship programs.
For more insight on some of these and other highlights from the document, check out the AFL-CIO’s overview https://betterinaunion.org/project-2025.
Apart from the anti-union, anti-worker policies Project 2025 lays out that we should all take as personal attacks, Project 2025 identifies every possible way for the Trump administration to give more power to corporate interests and allow their power to go unchecked, which as we all know is very harmful to working families.
President Trump has had every opportunity to condemn the policies in this document, but he hasn’t. Make no mistake, the right to organize, to benefit from safety protections and receive basic rights at work we’ve fought very hard for over the past few decades will disappear if President Trump wins this election.
President Trump has shown time and time again that he only cares about himself. We need only look as far back as his administration and the people he associates himself with to see that once again, he would not represent the interests of our members well in the White House. Project 2025 is 920 more pages of bad policy ideas, adding to an already mounting pile of evidence, for why he doesn’t deserve another term in office.