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This Labor Day, people across the country will celebrate the right to form and join a union, which has helped the middle class grow and thrive for a century. Over the past few years, there has been a resurgence of the labor movement in the United States, but this progress is now at risk from Project 2025. Their manifesto proposes policies that would make it easier for states to ban labor unions in the private sector, eliminate overtime protections, ignore the federal minimum wage, and allow corporations to fire workers who engage in organizing efforts. Project 2025 even goes so far as to propose eliminating rules that protect children from working dangerous jobs in places like meatpacking plants and mines. 

At the center of Project 2025’s hostility towards labor unions are its proposals for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent agency crucial to protecting workers’ right to organize. Under the Biden administration, the NLRB has made significant strides in ensuring workers can form unions and hold elections free from employer interference. According to an analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP), “workers today have a better chance of winning their union representation election than at any point in the past 15 years,” and, after a decline during the Trump Administration, workers are now averaging more than 1,700 elections for representation a year with a total of 115,000 workers voting in 2023. However, Project 2025 wants to roll back these gains by gutting the NLRB’s enforcement capacity, making it easier to decertify unions, and reversing rules that protect workers’ rights to organize. 

In June, Jonathan Berry, a former Trump Administration official and the author of the chapter for the Labor Department in the Mandate for Leadership, testified before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. During the hearing, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley confronted Berry about the severe policies he drafted, describing them as “policy violence” against people of color. Congressman Ro Khanna also questioned Berry about his support for Schedule F, a plan that would give the president authority to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with political loyalists. Berry’s unwavering endorsement of this plan, which he “100 percent” backed, underscores the dangerous intent behind Project 2025: to dismantle the civil service, undermine worker protections, and entrench political control over government agencies. 

Project 2025’s agenda is not just a threat to unions but to the broader working class. It would open the door to a radical shift in American policy that empowers corporations at the expense of American workers. Such measures would severely weaken the power of unions to advocate for fair wages, safe working conditions, and other essential protections that benefit all workers, not just union members, and erode the hard-won gains that have improved the lives of American workers over the past century. 

This Labor Day, Accountable.US is proud to celebrate American workers and the work of the labor movement by shining a light on the dangerous and extreme policies of Project 2025 that would gut collective bargaining rights and roll back hard-won policies that have helped the middle class.

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