Project 2025 Jeopardizes Workers' Rights to Overtime Pay and Fair Compensation

Overtime pay is crucial in ensuring fair compensation and protecting workers’ time for personal and family obligations. Unfortunately, Project 2025—the blueprint for the GOP’s policy agenda—proposes changes that threaten these protections.

Project 2025 aims to reduce access to overtime pay and give employers more power to exclude employees from overtime benefits, favoring corporate profits over worker welfare. When workers aren’t eligible for overtime, employers can force them to work 60-to-70-hour workweeks without any extra pay.

Flexible Time Frames for Overtime Calculation

Project 2025 suggests allowing employers to calculate overtime over longer periods rather than weekly. This change would reduce workers' control over their schedules and make it harder to track earnings. Research indicates that such flexibility increases opportunities for fraud and abuse, leaving workers more vulnerable to wage theft.

Alternative to Time-and-a-Half Pay

Another proposal allows employees to choose between time-and-a-half pay and accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off. Studies by the Pew Research Center reveal that many workers already take less leave due to workplace pressure and fear of job loss, especially lower-wage workers. This proposal could pressure workers to accumulate paid time off they might never use, effectively eliminating overtime pay benefits.

Regional Variations in Overtime Thresholds

Project 2025 also proposes maintaining different overtime thresholds for different regions, claiming it would prevent punishing businesses in lower-cost areas like the Southeast. However, this approach would codify wage inequality, perpetuating low wages in regions where workers already earn less when adjusted for the cost of living.

Excluding Workers from Overtime Eligibility

Project 2025 supports the Trump administration’s overtime threshold of $35,568, which excluded many workers from overtime benefits. If the U.S. reverts to the Trump administration’s overtime pay rules, overtime pay would be stripped from 4.3 million workers.

These proposed changes would dismantle the protections that ensure fair compensation and work-life balance for American workers.