How Project 2025 Would Hurt Workers and Legalize Discrimination

Removing protections, creating a permanent underclass, throttling overtime, and more

Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.

The drama surrounding Joe Biden and the Democratic presidential nomination continues to unfold like a soap opera, with plot twists and decisions that make for a melodrama with existential stakes.

I’ll provide some updates on the latest in that saga as well as some other news, but tonight we’re leading with our first 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 largely focused on the segment about firing civil service employees and replacing them with ideologues. There’s far more to the nearly 1000-page document, and this new series will dig into elements of Project 2025 that would have a direct impact on working people.

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.

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How Project 2025 would screw workers: Part I

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 both specialized rules and the administrative law cases that produced them. Child labor, for example, earns just a quick mention underneath the subhead “Hazard-Order Regulations,” but the policy change recommended therein would be dramatic and have implications for millions of teenagers.

Most of the chapter reflects the pro-corporate ideology that has dominated the far-right for generations, but there are select passages that reflect a tension with its religious wing’s agenda — in fact, there are sometimes even rebuttals in the text itself, which suggests that the authors were butting heads. Fun times.

Note: This is a very long section and I don’t want to overwhelm readers, so I’m going to break it up into multiple parts over the next few issues. Then I’ll combine it all into a separate post so that it’s easily accessible to people and easy to share. After that, we’ll move on to other issues, largely geared toward the things we cover here, like voting rights, health care, and economic opportunity.

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.

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 recieving 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.

Part II coming on Thursday…

1️⃣ President Biden now trails in the rolling polling averages in every swing state, according to a new set of polls from Decision Desk and The Hill. Two other polls find Biden down by six and five points in Wisconsin, the one swing state where he regularly led in pre-debate surveys. Stories about his dramatic decline continue to be published. Political analysts predict landslide losses in the House and Senate.

Congressional Democrats have literally been reduced to tears, Sen. Michael Bennet went on CNN to give the doomsday scenario, and the party is drowning in innuendo and in a state of paralysis. Keep an eye on Nancy Pelosi’s appearance on Morning Joe on Wednesday and Biden’s solo press conference at NATO on Thursday.

2️⃣ On a brighter note, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden sent a letter asking the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel to investigate Clarence Thomas and his penchant for taking bribes from conservative billionaires. Will Merrick Garland actually take action? He’s only a little less catatonic than Dick Durbin, so who knows!

3️⃣ Here’s how normalized extremism has become: Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley openly touted himself as a Christian nationalist in a speech yesterday.

4️⃣ Denver Mayor Mike Johnston introduced a new ballot measure that would add a .05% sales tax onto purchases in the city, with the revenue to be used to build additional affordable housing. Estimates have the tax raising about $100 million per year, which would allow the city to put up another 25k units over the next decade for people who make less than the city’s median income.

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