Trump said he ‘hated’ to pay workers overtime. In office, he could gut overtime rules.

Former President Donald Trump said that when he was running his real estate business, he went out of his way to avoid paying workers overtime. 

“I know a lot about overtime. I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Sept. 29.

The Fair Labor Standards Act mandates that employees covered by the act must be paid at least time and a half of their wages if they work more than 40 hours in a workweek. 

Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term in office created by dozens of former Trump administration aides and allies, calls for changing those overtime rules so that the threshold for overtime pay is 80 hours in two work weeks. That means, for example, a worker who worked 50 hours one week but 29 the next would not qualify for overtime. 

“Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks,” Jonathan Berry, who served as acting assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor under Trump, wrote in Project 2025. “Specifically, employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four-week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period.”

While in office, Trump set the overtime salary threshold lower than the one that had been set in a rule but had been blocked under former President Barack Obama, leaving millions of workers ineligible for automatic overtime, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. 

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has expanded overtime eligibility. 

In April, the Biden administration finalized a rule that requires employers to pay overtime to salaried workers who earn $58,600 a year if they work more than 40 hours in a week. That rule expanded overtime pay to 4 million more salaried workers in the United States than under the previous salary threshold, Reuters reported at the time. 

Trump’s comments come as many unions have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, saying her policies would be better for workers.

“This isn’t a gaffe and he didn’t just misspeak — Trump said this in Michigan on Friday and Pennsylvania today,” the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States, wrote in a post on X on Sept. 29. “Trump cut overtime for millions of Americans as President — and his Project 2025 agenda will do it again.”

Harris’ campaign also called Trump out over his comments. 

“Donald Trump is finally owning up to it: He’s built an entire career on screwing over workers,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “It’s exactly what he did in the White House – trying to rip away tips and overtime pay for millions of workers – and exactly what he plans to do in a second term. Trump is a scab, plain and simple.”