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Economic capture

The Assault on Labor: Union-Busting by Design

Active dismantling
Case Dossier FED-LAB-001
STATUS
Active dismantling
SEVERITY
High
DATE
2025-05-15
DOMAIN
Economic Capture
SUBDOMAIN
Labor
CAPTURE VECTOR
Structural disempowerment
TAGS
labor unions davis-bacon project-labor-agreements overtime project-2025
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The administration operationalizes the Project 2025 labor blueprint, using 'State Innovation Waivers' to bypass federal labor standards while simultaneously moving to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, ban Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), and gut overtime protections.

Summary

By mid-2025, the Department of Labor (DOL) began systematically implementing the “Department of Labor and Related Agencies” chapter of Project 2025. The strategy is a multi-front assault on organized labor and worker protections, utilizing both executive action (“waivers”) and legislative pressure. Key components include:

  • Waiver Warfare: States are encouraged to use “State Innovation Waivers” to opt out of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), effectively nullifying federal labor rights at the local level.
  • Wage Suppression: The administration is moving to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act (which mandates prevailing wages on federal projects) and ban Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), claiming these protections “redistribute wealth” from taxpayers to workers.
  • Overtime Erosion: New rules propose allowing employers to calculate overtime over two-to-four week periods rather than weekly, eliminating time-and-a-half pay for workers who log long hours in a single week.

Capture Mechanisms

1. Instrumental Federalism

The regime uses “federalism” as a tool for deregulation. By allowing states to “exempt themselves” from federal labor laws (Project 2025, p. 605), the administration creates a race to the bottom where states compete for business by stripping worker rights.

2. The “Flexibility” Trap

Anti-worker policies are framed as “flexibility.”

  • The “Working Families Flexibility Act”: Allows employers to compensate overtime with paid time off instead of cash, effectively serving as an interest-free loan from the worker to the employer.
  • Independent Contractor Rules: Reverting to 2019 rules makes it easier to misclassify employees as contractors, stripping them of benefits and protections.

3. Institutional Decapitation

The blueprint explicitly targets the financial and organizational viability of unions:

  • Rescinding the “Persuader Rule”: Allows employers to hide anti-union consulting activities.
  • Banning “Card Check”: Forces secret ballot elections to make unionization harder.
  • Eliminating the “Contract Bar”: Makes it easier to decertify existing unions.

Analysis

This represents Structural Disempowerment. The goal is not merely to weaken unions but to atomize the workforce. By attacking the financial base of labor (prevailing wages), the organizational capacity (card check, contract bar), and the legal floor (FLSA waivers), the regime aims to remove the only organized economic counterweight to corporate power.