Washington, D.C. — A new column from the Center for American Progress explains how Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian playbook, would make eligibility for overtime—also known as time-and-a-half pay—more confusing for workers to navigate and easier for employers to abuse.
Overtime pay increases workers’ paychecks and helps protect their time for personal and family obligations. When workers aren’t eligible for overtime, employers can force them to work 60-to-70-hour workweeks without any extra pay.
Project 2025 would:
- Allow employers to pick and choose time frames to measure work hours: Project 2025 proposes allowing the employer to choose the time period, giving employees less control of and visibility into their own paychecks.
- Let employers avoid time-and-a-half pay: Project 2025 proposes allowing employers to substitute time off for traditional time-and-a-half pay. But giving employers more power would mean that they could prevent workers from using their banked paid time off, effectively eliminating overtime benefits of any kind.
- Explicitly prioritize the corporate bottom line over workers: Project 2025 prioritizes “flexibility” for employers over benefits to employees.
- Contend that millions fewer workers should get overtime pay: The Trump administration’s overtime threshold was only $35,568 a year, or $684 per week. Beyond the many ways Project 2025 proposes reducing employee power in the overtime system, even just reverting to the former overtime pay rules put in place by the Trump administration would take overtime away from 4.3 million workers.
“Project 2025’s far-right vision of overtime eligibility and benefits is designed to disempower workers,” said Lily Roberts, managing director for Inclusive Growth at CAP and author of the column. “It would put more power in the hands of employers to exploit employees, which is seemingly part of Project 2025’s larger goal: pad corporate bottom lines at the expense of workers.”
Read the column: “Project 2025 Would Cut Access to Overtime Pay” by Lily Roberts
For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Jasmine Razeghi at [email protected].