The administrative state is an arcane but important part of our lives as American citizens. These are the state and federal agencies that regulate our environment, ensure our food and water is safe to consume, and protect workers from workplace fatalities. Discussing niche federal agency policy may not be the most exciting topic for mainstream audiences during an election cycle. However, this is not the case for the 2024 election cycle because of Project 2025, a conservative policy framework put forth by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Underneath the plan’s inflammatory culture war rhetoric is a dangerous plan to destroy workers’ rights in the United States.
Republican politicians, like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, have recently changed their tune on supporting labor unions after years of advocating for anti-union right-to-work laws. Despite their most recent appeals to working-class Americans at the Republican National Convention, this newfound “pro-labor” conservatism is not manifesting itself within actual policy proposals. Donald Trump has notably distanced himself from Project 2025 because of the plan’s unpopularity, despite several Trump Administration alumni contributing their insight to the 900-page beast of a document. A full embrace of free market fundamentalism by the so-called populist wing of the Republican Party would completely expose “working-class” conservatism for the political farce that it is.
38 of the 900 pages of Project 2025 are dedicated to labor and employment policy, and not an ounce of its substance advocates for expanding workers’ rights, let alone making it easier to form a labor union. Upending what remains of the New Deal economic order is the overarching goal of most of these proposals. Chapter 18 of Project 2025 is dedicated to systematically dismantling the Department of Labor’s enforcement authority over employment law by restricting all its subsidiary agencies from doing their jobs.
Several of these policies are simply reheated Trump era DOL agency rulings. Trump’s National Labor Relations Board made no secret about being extremely biased toward employers over workers. One notable instance was the Trump NLRB’s 2019 ruling in favor of McDonald’s claim that they are not legally responsible for the actions of their franchisees. This created a narrower standard for determining joint employer status for workers who report to more than one business entity. This rule would have effectively prevented workers from filing unfair labor practice claims against big employers who franchise their operations. The Biden NLRB instituted a more expansive joint employer standard that extended bargaining obligations and legal liability to employers who hire their labor force through franchisees, such as fast food chain restaurants. Project 2025 seeks to repeal the Biden era ruling and reinstate the Trump NLRB’s decision. (Mandate for Leadership pg. 591).
If the Heritage Foundation’s contempt for working class Americans wasn’t clear enough, the plan calls for a more restrictive overtime salary threshold (Mandate for Leadership pg. 592). At the beginning of the Trump Administration, the DOL declined to defend the outgoing Obama era salary threshold from right-wing lawfare. In 2019, the Trump DOL enshrined a lower salary threshold of $35,568 a year compared to the already modest Obama threshold of $47,476 a year. This ruling made roughly 8.2 million workers ineligible for overtime pay.
Project 2025 takes an extremely lax approach to holding employers accountable for breaking labor laws by seeking to hamstring the NLRB’s ability to prosecute employers who engage in unfair labor practices. The plan calls for a narrower interpretation of “protected concerted activity” which protects collective action in the workplace as a form of free speech and free association (Mandate for Leadership pg. 601). Project 2025 would reinstate the five factors test which only protects five specific circumstances of employee free speech from employer retaliation. Biden’s NLRB recently reestablished the more expansive employee speech protections under the totality of circumstances test used before 2019. Narrowing what constitutes concerted activity in the workplace to five rigid scenarios would make it easier for employers to fire pro-union employees for organizing their co-workers. It would also leave fired workers with less avenues for legal recourse under NLRB procedure.
Under the Heritage Foundation’s ideal labor relations system, forming a union and bargaining for a first contract would be a near-herculean task. Project 2025 seeks to recreate Gilded Age organizing conditions by effectively legalizing company unions. The authors endorse the passage of the TEAM Act, which would allow for employers to create Employee Involvement Organizations (EIO) as an alternative to traditional labor unions (Mandate for Leadership pg. 599). Before the National Labor Relations Act, employers used to create their own heavily controlled “unions” which were restricted from bargaining for anything more than minor workplace improvements. EIOs, as conceived by the TEAM Act, are management-selected worker advisement boards that provide no real bargaining leverage to workers because employers are allowed to determine committee agendas, the outcomes of committee deliberation, and dissolve worker committees all together. The TEAM Act would also allow employers to bargain exclusively with EIOs rather than the democratically elected leadership of an independent union.
By far the most shocking policy proposal is the Heritage Foundation’s plan to make employment discrimination legal again. The foundation seeks to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy” by instructing all DOL agencies not to enforce non-discrimination rules (Mandate for Leadership pg. 584). It also aims to eliminate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance programs, which enforces non-discrimination laws on federal contractors (Mandate for Leadership pg. 584). The justification for not enforcing non-discrimination policies is that they are at least in part informed by DEI or CRT related theories. Members of the foundation also reason that legal discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals is legitimate for religious employers.
Project 2025’s vision for a less equitable and less safe workplace makes all of Donald Trump’s populist appeals to the working-class suspect at best. The conservative thought leaders behind this plan gave away the game by supporting such a brazenly anti-worker agenda. Undermining the NLRB’s statutory authority over enforcing labor protections has nothing to do with preserving the freedoms of citizens. It has everything to do with protecting the class interests of billionaires at the expense of a dignified workplace.
Image credit: Trump at a campaign event in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in May. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Bibliography
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