During his first term, Trump cut overtime pay for millions of people. The second term could be worse

While former President Donald Trump portrays himself as a champion of the working class with promises to cut taxes overtime, his record as a businessman and president paints a different picture. Trump and his businesses have faced numerous allegations of failure to pay workers overtime they were owed. Once in office, Trump’s Department of Labor issued legislation that cut by millions the number of workers who were eligible for overtime pay under the Obama-era law.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for Trump’s second term that the former president may have embraced and distanced himself from, is moving forward. The 900-page document outlines plans for a comprehensive overhaul of overtime protections that would give employers ways to avoid paying overtime to workers who qualify for time-and-a-half pay after 40 hours.

When asked to comment on the issue, which includes Trump’s overtime proposals and lawsuits against his businesses, a Trump campaign spokesperson responded only, “Project 2025 has nothing to do with the campaign.” A spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation previously declined to comment on the policy when asked Capital & Mainand added, “The 2025 Project does not speak for President Trump or his campaign.” At least 140 people who worked for Trump were involved in creating Project 2025, however, and in 2022 Trump said that the Heritage Foundation “will lay the foundation and details of the plans for what our organization is going to do.”

One employee who will face financial consequences if the Project 2025 proposals become reality is Theresa Kinard. After working for 15 years at a Waffle House in Marietta, Georgia, her base salary is still $19 an hour. “Not enough,” he commented. Although her oldest daughter also works at Waffle House, they have to live together “so we can both live,” she said.

Even so, Kinard’s paycheck continues to slow due to overtime. He was scheduled to work 40 hours a week, and without overtime, he would earn an annual salary of $39,520. But his restaurant is so understaffed that he is often asked to work long hours, earning him time-and-a-half pay for the extra shifts he takes each week. At $28.50 an hour, an extra 10 to 15 additional hours adds up to about $400 a week.

“Overtime, it helps a lot,” he said. “Without you, many things would not be taken care of.” He would be short on paying bills each month, like his car note or car insurance, or he wouldn’t be able to pay for all his food. Losing access to overtime pay “could mean getting fired,” he said, or “could mean losing my car.”

“It’s going to hinder us really badly,” he said.

He and millions of other Americans may face it if Trump’s second term is anything like his first and if he accepts the overtime recommendations outlined in Chapter 18 of the Project 2025 plan.

Project 2025 calls for repealing the Biden administration’s wage expansion and also proposes ways for employers to avoid paying it to those who qualify, undermining its status as a worker protection.

For all the overtime provisions of Project 2025, “employees do not receive additional benefits. Only employers get more benefits,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute Action, a nonpartisan advocacy group focused on economic issues. Employers are offered various ways to avoid paying extra money for extra work while benefiting from the work of the employees. “It’s a very anti-overtime program,” he said.

Overtime is “just a core labor standard,” Shierholz said. If an employer decides to ask employees to “add chaos to their lives” by working unusually long hours, he noted, overtime ensures that “employees are not working those hours for free.” It also puts a check on long hours—some employers will decide they prefer not to pay overtime and leave for 40 workers a week. When the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, emphasizing the right to overtime pay and a minimum wage, it helped standardize the work week to eight hours a day, five days a week.

While in office, Trump refused to support Obama-era legislation that would have extended overtime pay to an additional four million workers. Instead, Trump released his own legislation that significantly reduced the number of people eligible for overtime, adding protections to only 1.3 million additional workers.

After Trump left office, President Joe Biden finalized his overtime law, which this summer adjusted Trump’s salary threshold of $35,568 to qualify for overtime pay to account for inflation. Biden’s legislation would also raise the salary limit from $43,888 to $58,656 in January 2025. Additionally, it mandates that the limit be reviewed every three years to keep pace with inflation. Once fully implemented, an additional 4.3 million workers will be eligible for overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours a week.

Project 2025 calls for a rollback as well, saying the next Republican president should scrap Biden’s overtime law and return to the Trump administration’s version, with inflation accounting updates every five years. Doing so would make Kinard and other workers like him eligible under Biden’s act no longer eligible for additional pay.

The document goes further, asking Congress to allow employers to calculate overtime pay in two or four weeks instead of one. Although the document says this will give workers “greater flexibility,” in reality, workers will end up earning less. An employee who works 45 hours one week and 35 the next will receive overtime pay for those five extra hours in the first week under current law, but if the average is more than two he will not receive overtime pay.

“Employers will be able to play that like crazy,” Shierholz said. They may ask workers to work incredibly long hours in a week “and then alternate their hours in the week or the following weeks so they don’t get paid overtime.”

Those two provisions combined — rolling back Biden’s law and allowing employers to calculate overtime pay over multiple weeks — would have removed overtime protections for 8 million workers, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute Action, which Shierholz described as “a pretty good estimate.”

The 2025 project contains other ideas that would destroy overtime pay and protections. It requires allowing workers to trade their overtime pay for paid time off. While we’re at it, the proposal appears to give workers paid time off, which most Americans don’t have, instead it’s about allowing workers to “change wages over time,” said Lynn Rhinehart, executive director at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s deceptive.”

Employers can now agree to allow employees to receive paid leave if they put in overtime under current law. The offer instead “doesn’t give employees more benefits,” Shierholz said. “It only gives employers more rights.” Employers will have the power to decide when employees will give up paid leave; employees will also have to ask employers to use the comp time they have saved up, and they don’t have to be allowed to if they need it.

The conservative plan says Congress should pass a law denying overtime pay to telecommuters unless they log 10 hours a day—meaning someone who works nine hours a day, five days a week, won’t get extra pay for those five extra hours. more than 40.

Project 2025 also calls for allowing unions to negotiate existing workplace laws—including the minimum wage and overtime—rather than treating them as if they were the bottom. That will force unions to negotiate what has long been considered a low workplace standard.

The provision is “sad,” Shierholz said, because it “just disempowers workers” while giving employers “a new bargaining chip.” Finally, it says states should be given waivers from labor laws to “encourage testing.” One of those could be the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows states to exempt businesses from overtime pay and the minimum wage, Shierholz said.

Recently, while on the campaign trail, Trump proposed protecting overtime pay from taxes. An analysis by Yale University’s Budget Lab and the Tax Foundation found that, if such legislation were introduced and passed by Congress, it would be very expensive, costing hundreds of billions of dollars in lost tax revenue over a decade. Those estimates are too conservative, however, because they don’t account for how highly paid workers can game the system by converting their pay to a lower hourly rate and getting tax-free benefits for all overtime pay on top of that.

“I think it’s very unreasonable,” Shierholz said. “It’s very ironic. He has ruined overtime and staff left and right.”

Trump himself is accused of failing to pay workers. His companies were cited for violating 24 times overtime or minimum wage protections between 2005 and 2016, according to Labor Department data analyzed by USA Today. A lawsuit in the early 1980s alleged that his real estate company paid Polish immigrant contractors only $4 to $5 an hour with no overtime pay, even though they worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Some workers say they have never been paid at all. The case ended in a closed settlement.

Guy Dorcinvil, a dishwasher at Mar-a-Lago, filed a lawsuit in 2007 alleging he was not paid overtime for a three-year period, which resulted in him paying $7,500 the following year. In 2016, Trump Miami Resort Management settled with 48 servers for failing to pay overtime, paying an average of $800 per worker. The lawsuit alleges that some workers spent 20 hours on a 10-day event. In response to reports of the last two lawsuits, Trump insisted that all contractors and employees were paid fairly and that the complaints represented a small part of his business.

Taken together, Trump’s past business practices, his presidency, and the Project 2025 agenda show a focus on undermining defense overtime. “The ability to get more time is security and stability,” notes Janelle Jones, vice president for policy and advocacy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Project 2025 attacks “workers’ wages [and] their safety and economic security.”

This piece was originally published by Capital & Mainreporting from California on economic, political, and social issues.