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Project 2025: A Warning for Labor

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The right to strike, the eight-hour day, and the minimum wage have only been recognized by federal law since the 1930s. Even those basic protections come riddled with loopholes. Important groups, such as domestic workers and agricultural workers, are excluded. Now the right wing has its sights set on stripping away those rights won by more than a hundred years of hard organizing and bloody battles.  Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” spells out just how they would do it.

Project 2025 was initiated by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, with support from over 80 organizations that have been on the front line of extremist positions. The nearly 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” report lays out detailed plans that could be put in place if Donald Trump wins the presidency this fall.

In this video, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Center, talks with Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter and Convergence’s Stephanie Luce about what Project 2025 could mean for workers—and what we can do to push back against the Right’s plans.

The Project 2025 report’s chapter on the Labor Department contains a few items that sound appealing, such as overtime pay for Sunday work—but the plan aims to undermine labor unions and independent worker power, and hand employers more control over their workforce. Even the positive elements are primarily in the service of a Christian nationalist agenda, aimed at bolstering a male-head-of-household, stay-at-home mother family.

Project 2025 would make it easier for employers to set up company unions, and to misclassify workers as independent contractors. It would provide more government resources to investigate unions and worker centers, but sap agencies charged with enforcing workers’ safety and rights. 

“Project 2025 comes for everybody,” Henderson says. “It comes for LGBTQIA+ folks. It comes for folks of color and people of good will of all stripes. But it particularly comes for labor. Unions and workers and all of us who care about worker justice need to take this very seriously.”

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About the Host

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research & Education Center in New Market, TN. As a member of multiple leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has thrown down on the Vision for Black Lives and the BREATHE Act. Ash-Lee has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of the National Bailout Collective, and is an active leader of The Frontline. She is a long-time activist who has done work in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, for LGBTQUIA+ folks, for environmental justice, and more.

Ash-Lee is a member of the Advisory Board of Convergence Magazine.

Jackson Potter

As a high school student in Chicago in 1995, Jackson Potter led a walk-out to push for equitable schools funding in Illinois. He taught at Englewood High School and was the union delegate there when the district slated the school for closure. He and Al Ramirez formed the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in May 2008 and the Grassroots Education Movement, with community organizations, shortly thereafter. He and future CTU president Karen Lewis served together as the first co-chairs of CORE. After working as CTU’s staff coordinator for eight years, he went back to teaching and serves on the union’s Executive Board as vice president.

Stephanie Luce
Stephanie Luce is a professor at the City University of New York's School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is the author of Labor Movements: Global Perspectives (Wiley, 2014) and Fighting for a Living Wage (Cornell University Press, 2004), a member of the Convergence written content team and recent member of its Editorial Board. Her writing can be found at https://stephanieluce.net.