Project 2025's Chapter on Labor
The expected attacks on DEI, with a sleight of hand to undermine workers
On this 130th Labor Day as a national holiday, I will be exploring the Labor chapter of Project 2025.
In preparing for this, I found myself digging out my 30-year-old, half-read copy of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.”
Because Project 2025’s plan for labor in the U.S. is to take us back to the 1950s, to the 15 years post-WWII when women were supposed to find fulfillment only in the home and, in the phrase Friedan coined, grappled silently with “the problem that has no name.”
Ironically, Jonathan Berry, who wrote this chapter (number 18) on Labor, starts out his argument for decimating the labor market by exalting the “need for rewarding, well-paying, and self-driven careers.” In the next sentence, he writes that the Judeo-Christian tradition has always “recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity.”
In between those paeans to work, Berry makes clear his intention to “restore the family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy.”
In other words, he wants to go back to the 1950s, when men went to work, had affairs with their secretaries, came home and expected dinner on the table and watched TV all night; while their wives led lives of quiet desperation.
“I feel empty… incomplete,” one woman told Friedan in 1960. “It’s as if I don’t exist.”
That is the idea that underscores the P25 Labor chapter. White men should be exalted and given fulfilling work. Women should take care of them. And Black and Hispanic people should be shunted back to the subservient roles they held 100 years ago.
Remember, lynching was common 100 years ago.
Give Us a D! Give Us an E. Give Us an I!
In a 35-page chapter about the dignity of well-paying and fulfilling work, the term DEI is used - in a derogatory way - seven times.
But don’t fret about the small number. Later on, when the chapter addresses retirement accounts, it eschews the use of “Environmental, Social, Governance” (ESG) from employer retirement plans. In Berry’s view, we should not allow employees to choose to invest their retirement in “liberal issues,” like racism or climate change.
In other words, DEI.
The phrase “sex discrimination” is mentioned eight times in the chapter - all in a hissy fit that recognizing queer people, as well as sexism in the workplace for queer and cis people, is emasculating to the population at large and bad for the U.S.
The people who wrote Project 2025 think J.D. Vance’s “childless cat lady” quip is hilarious. And they can’t figure out why anyone would be upset with it.
As Matthew the bible guy supposedly said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” I long ago came to the conclusion that those born with blinders and lack of emotional intelligence feel they own the earth, and bully the rest of us into doing their bidding. They don’t see the quiet desperation that their sexism and racism wrings. And if they don’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you point it out, you are not only lying, but you’re trying to ruin their lives.
This chapter - hell, this entire 900-page document - also rests on the mistaken theory that race is about skin color. As I have pointed out before, the amazing Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” shows definitively that race is about power and hierarchy. The power and hierarchy in the U.S. is based on skin color. In India it’s based on birth designation. In 1930s Germany it was based on religion. As it was during the Crusades.
If Project 2025 is enacted, it will essentially gut Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, limiting it only to police employment “discrimination” against white people.
As in many other chapters of P25, this chapter calls for the elimination of data collection. So we won’t know the employment statistics of different groups of people.
As I said, the writers of this document rely heavily on not knowing.
Are you gay? Trans? Have a child/sister/brother/parent who is gay or trans? You can be fired from your job. Remember in the forward to P25, trans identity is defined by these guys as “pornography.” This chapter enables the punishment mechanism for that definition.
Do you take birth control? With the gutting of the EEOC, there is no recourse if you are fired from your job for being “anti-family.”
Undermining the Good Ideas
Now, I will say that there are policy suggestions in this document that I like. For Berry, this is part of the “pro-family” agenda that employers must adhere to.
The parts that I like are:
Allowing workers to accumulate more paid time off
Incentivizing on-site childcare - and not taking the cost out of employees’ pay
But then Berry undermines these great ideas by asserting that he wants to “find the true causes” of the wage gap, rather than “politicized studies” done at the Dept. of Labor.
I think by “politicized” he means “findings that I don’t see because I have blinders on.”
The issue for me is that prior to these suggestions, Berry defines “pro-family” as families headed by men with no queer people.
“Pro-family,” to Berry, means “pro-Christian.” He suggests a mandate that requires employees to not work on the sabbath - and defines sabbath as a Sunday (unless the owner of the company is Jewish).
His flexible family suggestions are also undermined on page 590, when he starts a 2-page rant on how we should “allow” more employees to be independent contractors. As if employees who work for Uber - and have no recourse when the company floods the market with so many drivers they can’t make a living - really are more “free.” The fact that Uber makes a shit-ton of money off the backs of “independent contractors,” and that these “free” workers must spend even more time away from their families in order to make ends meet seems to be lost on him.
Berry does say, on page 591, that independent contractors should get the same benefits as employees. But if there is no government oversight, then can’t a company structure all jobs so that they’re “flexible” and therefore take away all benefits?
This is just pretending to care for workers.
Privatize It All!
Berry is also pretending to care for small businesses. A later chapter on the Small Business Administration (chapter 25) calls for limiting direct loans to small businesses - mandating, instead, the use of private banks. Instead of fixing the problems that the SBA has, due to lack of funding in the last few decades, the authors of that chapter simply want to throw the baby out with the bath-water.
Remember, the aim of the P25 authors is to make government so small it’s irrelevant. They want to then farm out what governmental obligations they want to keep to the private sector.
The $35 insulin? You think Big Pharma will keep that rule? Banks are already fighting the cap on overdraft fees, which the Biden Administration announced in January. Do you think they would be better stewards than the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
Without a doubt, my favorite thing about Project 2025 is how passive-aggressive it is. The document twists itself into knots to not make definitive statements. The authors - and the editors - couch their language in generalities that are meant to sound innocuous. Until you think through to the (totally intended) consequences.
The example below from this chapter, on page 595, tickled me in its attempt at obfuscation.
I love how Berry is like, “family businesses are being punished for hiring their teens,” when there are currently exceptions for family businesses in the law. The real issue here is that conservatives want owners of businesses like meat-packing plants to be able to hire teens, as modeled by Sarah Huckabee-Sanders in Arkansas.
This chapter on Labor also has five pages on Unions. It starts like this:
I can add nothing to this.
Hope your Labor Day is going well. It was brought to you by union workers.
Here, as usual, is the entire annotated chapter on Labor
Analyzing, annotating and writing about these chapters takes a lot of time and work.
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