Project 2025 Replaces the American Worker With a Global Poverty Regime
How the Project 2025 Labor System Functions in Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Haiti
Rural Mississippi Delta housing reflects conditions produced when labor no longer pays for life, public health weakens, and policy choices entrench permanent poverty, conditions now being extended rather than reversed. Photo credit: Reuters
Photographer: Jonathan Bachman
The labor standards now being dismantled built the largest middle class in the history of the world through deliberate federal enforcement of wages, safety, collective bargaining, and social insurance that aligned productivity with broad based prosperity. Those standards converted industrial labor into stable livelihoods, translated growth into homeownership, retirement security, reduced injury, reduced poverty, and durable democratic participation across generations. Under Project 2025, that system is deliberately abandoned and economic life is reorganized around disposability through weakened enforcement, stripped protections, and transferred risk, a blueprint with a record that repeats wherever it is used, producing perpetual turnover and permanent economic insecurity.
What this agenda dismantles is the labor structure that sustained the American middle class, replacing it with a global poverty regime in which employment persists without security, wages fail to sustain life, and risk is forcibly shifted from institutions onto individuals. This transformation unfolds alongside rising preventable disease, declining vaccination rates, and strained public health systems, driving poverty and illness through entire communities.
This is already underway.
An American rural community showing the conditions that emerge when work no longer secures housing, public investment retreats, and policy choices allow neglect to become permanent, a trajectory this article warns is accelerating rather than reversing. Photo credit Reuters Photographer: Jonathan Ernst
In Bangladesh, labor markets rely on widespread misclassification, suppressed wages, and minimal safety enforcement, leaving millions employed yet poor for life while workplace injury and death are treated as routine production costs. Harmed workers are replaced, families absorb medical and caregiving burdens, public hospitals carry the damage, and employers face limited accountability as safety oversight weakens and responsibility narrows.
Across Nigeria, informal labor dominates large sectors of the economy amid weak enforcement, limited collective bargaining, and courts inaccessible to most workers, producing a vast working poor population alongside concentrated wealth. Workers cycle through unstable employment, untreated illness, housing insecurity, and debt while legal remedies function symbolically, and expanding insecurity drives crime, broader policing, and incarceration used to contain poverty and its fallout. This pattern is mirrored through suppressed unions, privatized remedies, and near total transfer of labor risk onto individuals.
Within Haiti, weakened labor protections produce an economy where work rarely provides a reliable path to security, healthcare access remains limited, preventable disease circulates widely, and poverty is criminalized through enforcement rather than addressed through policy. Employment exists without stability, pushing governments toward emergency care, policing, and incarceration instead of wages, safety standards, and long term investment, and although the United States possesses greater wealth, the same pattern appears wherever labor protections are stripped and workers are treated as disposable.
The United States is being reshaped to resemble these systems through gradual normalization rather than sudden rupture.
An American mountain town showing what follows when wages no longer sustain homes, infrastructure decays without repair, and policy decisions allow abandonment to settle in as a permanent condition rather than a temporary failure. Credit: Reuters
Photographer: Jonathan Ernst
Sustained erosion of worker protections, weakened enforcement, and accepted human damage lead to the same outcomes wherever they are applied, and under the policies advanced by Project 2025 the United States can be pushed into these conditions through repetition and acceptance.
Labor degradation compounds damage when paired with withdrawal of social policy. Alongside weakened labor standards, Project 2025 targets unemployment insurance, disability access, public health funding, food assistance, housing supports, and regulatory enforcement that once absorbed economic shock. As wages stagnate, injuries rise, and employment destabilizes, removal of these buffers ensures that illness, job loss, caregiving, or aging escalates immediately into crisis, with poverty managed through hospital corridors and holding cells rather than prevented through stability and support.
Across systems where labor protections are weak, the results are the same, suppressed wages, chronic illness, housing instability, family fragmentation, elevated crime, and expanded prison systems used to absorb the fallout of economic disposability. As workplace protections erode alongside declining vaccination coverage and strained public health capacity, outbreaks spread faster and illness becomes another mechanism of labor attrition.
Between 1947 and the early 1970s, during the strongest period of federal labor enforcement, United States productivity and median worker compensation rose together, union density exceeded one third of the workforce, poverty fell sharply, and homeownership expanded at a scale unmatched by any other industrial nation, producing the largest durable middle class ever recorded.
That system is now being forced into the United States through expanded worker misclassification, weakened overtime and prevailing wage enforcement, reduced safety oversight, suppressed collective bargaining, privatized justice through mandatory arbitration, and fragmented national labor standards, leaving employment visible while security is stripped away and costs are dumped into emergency rooms, shelters, courts, police departments, and prisons.
The American middle class emerged from federal choices that protected workers, enforced safety, expanded bargaining power, stabilized families, reduced crime, limited incarceration, and aligned productivity with wages while supporting mass vaccination, workplace health standards, and the public trust required to manage disease collectively. Project 2025 abandons this legacy and replaces it with exposure, churn, and extraction.
The country is already deep into Project 2025, and consequences are measurable across labor, health, and community stability. This agenda accelerates the United States away from its industrial era labor foundations and toward a developing country condition defined by mass poverty, weak protections, disposable work, and the widespread circulation of preventable disease. The system that once held the middle class together can still be rebuilt and expanded if political will exists to dismantle an economy organized around disposability and restore dignity, stability, and power to those whose labor sustains the country. The window remains open, narrowing with time, and history will record whether this moment produced restoration or entrenched regression.
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Sources
Economic Policy Institute. The Productivity–Pay Gap
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap
International Labour Organization. Global Wage Report
https://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/global-wage-report
World Bank. Informal Employment and Poverty Dynamics
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/jobs/brief/informal-employment
World Health Organization. Occupational health, employment conditions, injury, and disease
https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/occupational-health
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vaccination coverage trends
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/coverage
U.S. Department of Labor. History of the Fair Labor Standards Act
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa/history
National Labor Relations Board. The National Labor Relations Act
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Economic conditions and incarceration
https://bjs.ojp.gov
This year, we will be celebrating our 250th anniversary. When we compare our history with that of Europe, we observe a dramatic difference in the number of years of existence.
The history of Europe begins with classical antiquity around 800 BC, meaning this civilization has existed for 2,826 years, including the 2026 years of our present calendar.
If you start with the Middle Ages (AD 500 to 1,500), also known as the medieval period, which lasted 1,000 years, and then add the years from 1500 to 2026 (a total of 526 years), you get a combined duration of 1,526 years. Our 250 years of history represent only about 6% of Europe's total historical timeline, which extends back to the medieval period and covers 1,526 years.
Historically, our history has been limited. We have experienced one major internal conflict, a civil war, and several other wars since our separation from Europe. We have lived under a single constitution; we have had expansive land and resources; and our population has grown through both natural increase and immigration. We had vast areas of land that allowed for growth; we were a fortunate land.
The early inhabitants of our country were very different from each other; northerners differed significantly from southerners. The South had valid reasons to consider seceding from the North. This division between the North and South has existed and continues to exist today. The expansion and settlement of large areas in the West have further complicated our history. We were expanding rapidly, further fragmenting our country's natural resources.
Europe experienced aggressive wars and state reconfigurations, whereas our short history of 250 years has seen no major restructuring, division, or reform of our government. A vital consideration is whether you can imagine what the country will be like in 5 or 10 years. Or, put differently, will we still be a divided nation? A nation with essential disagreements about significant aspects of our lives. Combine that with the destruction of every aspect of our government by the neo-conservative shadow government that is directing our present government.
Do you think we will survive in our current setup, or will we need to make significant changes to steer our course and ensure our country's longer future? We have a considerable disagreement that can't be resolved within our current government structure. There is no way for aspects of our country to coexist; we have enormous differences in the very nature of the things we think are essential to our society. We were founded by diverse groups of people with different philosophies about the values by which we should live. We will never be able to reconcile these differences; we should acknowledge them and work toward reforming our union's structure. We don't have to make our differences our enemy; instead, they are our neighbors living in a neighboring state that is separate from my state.
How can I find the Master Emergency Voter Documentation Guide?