Right now our country is seeing an incredible resurgence in workers' rights, with more unions winning election than any time in the prior 15 years.
The Republican Heritage Foundation's plan will undo the gains that workers have made.
Here are Project 2025's policies affecting unions, reporting by Labor Notes:
Day 1 they want to fire the best National Labor Relations Board general counsel we’ve had in my lifetime, Jennifer Abruzzo.
Then Project 2025 foresees reclassifying thousands of civil service employees by executive order so they can be fired and replaced with the corporations’ loyal troops.
From there, the plan is to bulldoze the protections U.S. workers have built up over 100 years of determination, sacrifice, and unity.
It’s ugly: abolish overtime pay laws, outlaw public sector unions entirely, get rid of health and safety protections, eliminate the federal minimum wage by letting states set their own, make it harder to receive unemployment, put children back to work like in the 1920s.
Hitting building trades workers, they would get rid of requirements for prevailing wage pay and project labor agreements in federal projects.
For more specifically about union election and the NLRB, read this detailed breakdown (facts, figures, and more!) by The Center for American Progress.
The Republicans want to make it easier for employers to put pressure on unionized employees to dissolve unions, and faster:
Contract Bar Rule. Although current labor law allows a union to establish itself at a workplace at more or less any time, the calendar for any attempt to decertify a union is considerably more constrained. If a union is recognized as a collective bargaining agent, then employees may not decertify it or substitute another union for it for at least one year under federal law (the “certification bar”). Similarly, when a union reaches a collective bargaining agreement with an employer, it is immune from a decertification election for up to three years (the “contract bar”). A typical consequence of these rules is that employees must often wait four years before they are allowed a chance at decertification. Employees then have only a 45-day window to file a decertification petition; if the employer and union sign a successor contract, then the contract bar comes into play once again—meaning employees with an interest in decertification must wait another three years.
Under the guise of "flexibility," Project 2025 Republicans want to make federal workers' employment and safety rights a negotiable line item… allowing employers to put pressure on employees to accept unsafe work practices as part of their collective bargaining:
Tailoring National Employment Rules. National employment laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)21 and the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act22 set out one-size-fits-all “floors” regulating the employment relationship. These substantive worker protections often do not mesh well with the procedural worker protections offered through the NLRA’s collective bargaining process. Unions could play a powerful role in tailoring national employment rules to the needs of a particular workplace if, in unionized workplaces, national rules were treated as negotiable defaults rather than non-negotiable floors.
![A set of bar graphs depicting the effects of overtime on a worker's paycheck. At the top, a snippet from Project 2025 reads: "Attention: Republican Agenda. Specifically, employers...should be able to set a two or four week period over which to calculate overtime. This...would not require the employer to pay [employees] more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period."
Underneath on the left is a set of green bars depicting Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.
In Week One, there is a darker shaded section pointing out that the worker has worked more than 40 hours and is eligible for overtime.
Week 2 is a little less than 40 hours, and the last two weeks are normal (40 hours).
At the bottom of this set of bars, a summary reads: "You're paid overtime for EVERY week over time, regardless of other weeks."
On the right, a set of red bar graphs depicting Week 1 through 4. In Week 1, the employee has clearly worked more than 40 hours based on the long bar, but there is no overtime shading.
Week 2 is less than 40, and Week 3 and 4 are both 40.
At the bottom of this set of bars, a summary reads: "Your employer will AVERAGE weeks together...and you won't get paid."
A Republican win in November means: Same hours. No overtime.
Learn more at Project 2025 Truth dot com](http://images.ctfassets.net/ud0fpafebkep/dfWezS2sNCp0RckQO0Qto/ac92619956f0630189e675554b35d053/image-8.png)
