What Project 2025 Says About Your Overtime Pay
Project 2025 proposes an eighty hour two week period or a hundred and sixty hour four week period before overtime kicks in, to be negotiated between labor and management.
Buried in Project 2025 on page 592 is a bullet point that could determine the size of your paycheck if the next Republican administration makes it a priority:
"Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks. Specifically, employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four- week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period."
Whether or not you think it's likely to pass Congress and be signed into law under a Trump administration isn't the question. The question is are you aware of the corporate lobbying that continually tries to take away your rights as an employee.
The right wing think tanks that helped write Project 2025 are heavily funded by corporate money. Whether they also have grass roots donors, their primary allegiance is to the big corporations. The biggest tax cuts are always for the wealthiest taxpayers. Deregulation usually benefits corporate donors. A 160 hour work month would benefit big business.
These organizations work on the idea of incrementalism, as I wrote it my August 13 Substack. They don't expect to get a hundred percent of their proposals from any single administration. They take what they can get and wait for the next time. Although the Heritage Foundation has recently drawn the most attention, each one of the hundred plus organizations behind Project 2025 leans heavily toward support of big corporations and Christian Nationalism. And isn't all that interested in the rights of labor.
Which brings us to their views about child labor. This is from page 595:
"DOL should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent."
The want to loosen regulations around children working in hazardous conditions. That's already happening in a number of red states.
These attitudes toward labor can be traced back to the East India Company and British Colonialism. The East India Company owned the tea that was thrown into Boston harbor in 1773. That protest was as much about the monopoly of a corporation as it was about taxes. Colonial America knew about the fate of Bengal under the East India Company's colonialism and wanted to prevent that from happening in the Americas.
Corporate management has always considered labor as a commodity. For the modern day Nabobs sitting in corporate boardrooms labor is faceless, a line on a balance sheet. The conservative think tanks represent the intests of those in the boardrooms. These think tanks wield a heavy influence with Republican politicians, who vote for the interests of the Nabobs in corporate boardrooms. If you work for wages and supplement your income with overtime, Republicans in office don't have your interests in mind when they vote on a bill. They're working for the corporate interests that helped elect them to office.
And who speaks for the corporations? That would be over a hundred conservative think tanks that signed on to Project 2025. Like the slow, steady drip of water on stone, they will eventually achieve their goals, to the impoverishment of working America, unless we are vigilant and stay current as to what they are attempting.
And vote blue up and down the ballot in November.
Notes:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-cut-access-to-overtime-pay/
https://www.newsweek.com/project-2025-full-list-organizations-proposals-1923240
Excellent information Robert. Let’s hope everyone heeds your warning and votes blue up and down their ballot. That what I did last Friday. Project 2025/is planning to change every part of our lives.