Project 2025 Is a Declaration of War Against Unions and Workers’ Rights

While Donald Trump and JD Vance attempt to publicly position themselves as the only Presidential ticket that truly supports and understands the working class, behind the scenes, their policy proposals show the actual truth: their deep disdain for working people.

If Trump and Vance take the White House — and the authors of Project 2025 get their way — workers’ hard-fought rights will certainly be at stake.

Project 2025 is a proposed presidential transition project that includes four pillars, including a policy guide and a list of actions for the next (Republican) president’s first 180 days in office. It’s being led by multiple former Trump administration officials, including Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump, while newly leaked documents show that dozens of former Trump officials have ties to the project.

Importantly for workers, Project 2025 aims to gut the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces labor law in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. But that’s not all: the architects of Project 2025 plan to repeal Davis-Bacon, which sets prevailing wage standards for construction projects; end project-labor agreements; ban card check even when a company is amenable to it; allow employers to create their own unions and refuse to negotiate with legitimate unions; make it easier to replace union workers with nonunion workers; ban all current and former union members from jobs in the administration (note: not sure how that would work since Donald Trump was a SAG-AFTRA member); allow states to ban unions for five years; eliminate protections against hazardous work for children; and more.

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Tom Tosti, the President of the Bucks County Central Labor Council, said that Project 2025 “is detrimental to our everyday lives and affects all working class people. The cuts to Medicare, to end the Affordable Care Act, to end the rights of Public Sector Unions to be able to bargain in their workplace, and to end a women’s right to choose are all issues that affect our members and our families. We need to educate people on this scam scheme they are looking to implement. It will bring our country back to 1925, which we are not willing to do.”

The goals of Project 2025 would affect workers all across the country. But while workers in liberal bastions like California or New York may be protected by state-wide laws passed by state or local officials to circumvent the federal government, for those in Pennsylvania, there’s no guarantee of anything like that. If Project 2025 comes to fruition, states will have the legal right to ban labor unions, along with the right to opt out of national overtime protections and minimum wage laws. Current Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro would presumably not allow that to happen – he could veto any additional anti-union laws that came across his desk, and he’s likely to sign onto additional support for workers if the federal government turned a blind eye to them. But with a Republican-controlled state senate, and a state house and governor’s office that constantly flip between blue and red, it’s unlikely that the state’s current political situation will hold for years to come. That could put Pennsylvania’s workers’ rights on the line.

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Lenora Price, who works in a long-term care facility in Philadelphia and is a member of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, is terrified of Project 2025. She told The Bucks County Beacon that “it would take away my right to my union, my right to have collective bargaining. It would take away my voice. I wouldn’t be able to speak up for myself or my residents, the people I take care of. I wouldn’t be able to get increased wages or better benefits or safe staffing.” Price is on leave from her caregiving job to work as a Member Political Organizer for her union, and is spending her time talking to her fellow union members and other workers about the importance of this election.

Unions plan to go all out to defeat Donald Trump and Project 2025, with millions of dollars donated, and thousands of members knocking on voters’ doors. They hope that a Harris-Walz administration will finish what President Biden started as the most pro-union president in history. Tosti told The Bucks County Beacon that the Labor Council has already started door knocking, phone banking, and text banking. Another SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania member, Erica Payne, who lives in the Pittsburgh area, is also a Member Political Organizer with her union. She referred to everyone’s vote as “precious,” and has already started knocking on doors to get out the vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. She said that “it’s way easier to defend what you have than it is to win something new. I don’t want to go backwards with my rights with Project 2025.”

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This would obviously be a shocking turn of events, especially after four years under President Joe Biden, “the most pro-union President” in this country’s history. The Biden administration appointed Jennifer Abruzzo, a union-side lawyer, to the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, along with banning certain non-compete clauses, expanding eligibility for overtime pay, and used the power of executive orders to obligate federal construction projects to have project-labor agreements that include hiring unionized workers. President Biden himself also encouraged Amazon workers in Alabama to unionize in 2021 via video message, and became the first president to walk on a picket line in 2023, when he joined United Auto Workers members on strike at the Big Three.

Suffice it to say, a Trump administration following the Project 2025 playbook would reverse any hard-fought gains won by unions and workers’ rights advocates.