This past Friday, Daily Kos joined other progressive organizations calling on senators who will be questioning Andrew Puzder to cast their committee votes against him for secretary of Labor. Here is our official letter of opposition:
US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions
428 Senate Dirksen Office Building
Washington, DC 20510 January 6, 2017
Dear Members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions:
On behalf of Daily Kos, the nation's largest progressive political blog, I am writing to urge committee members to oppose confirmation of Andrew Puzder as secretary of Labor. Like other pending appointees of President-Elect Donald Trump, Mr. Puzder expresses outright opposition to the founding objectives of the very department he has been chosen to lead. He gripes frequently about companies being over-regulated and workers being overprotected.
As you committee members all know, ever since it became a cabinet-level department 104 years ago, the Department of Labor's mission has been "to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights." Mr. Puzder, on the other hand, has a history of hostility to workers, much of it documented in his own words. That he has been selected to fill the Labor post clearly shows how quickly President-Elect Trump is willing to forget his campaign promises to improve the economic life of working-class Americans.
Puzder will certainly not be an advocate for such improvement. Indeed, as CEO of CKE Holdings, the parent company of Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast-food restaurants, he demonstrated that he has no interest in workers’ well-being. The department he has been chosen to steer has repeatedly brought complaints against his company during the 16 years he has been at its helm. For instance, CKE restaurants and franchises were found in violation of wage and hour laws in 60 percent of DOL investigations of the company since 2009.
Puzder, who makes nearly 300 times what the average worker earning minimum wage takes home in a year, is vituperative in his opposition to increasing that minimum. He wrote two years ago: "The feds can mandate a higher wage, but some jobs don’t produce enough economic value to bear the increase." Higher minimum wages, he says, means people who would have been hired won't be.
This may sound at first glance like genuine concern for employees whom he says would lose their jobs if the minimum wage were raised. But he is positively gleeful at the thought of replacing all those people behind the counter of Hardee's and Carl's Jr. with robots. In a 2016 interview, Puzder's delight at the idea of an employee-free business was only exceeded by his sarcastic disdain for the human beings who currently work for CKE: “[Machines are] always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”
All the while he complains about workers sticking up for their labor rights, their human rights, and their civil rights, Puzder repeatedly exposes his true colors. He even challenges the idea that employees be allowed to take work breaks. In a 2009 interview, Mr. Puzder asked: "Have you ever been to a fast-food restaurant and the employees are sitting and you're wondering, 'Why are they sitting?' They are on what is called a mandatory break." A secretary of Labor who thinks employees should work straight through without breaks is hardly one who believes in the department's mission of improving working conditions. Quite the opposite. Should employees be working instead of eating on their lunch breaks, too?
Puzder has been highly critical of the Obama administration's new rule to extend overtime pay requirements to 4.2 million additional workers whom employers have shortchanged by making them fake managers or otherwise cheating them.
But it's obviously not just that new overtime rule—currently blocked from implementation pending review by the federal courts—with which Mr. Puzder has an issue. CKE paid $9 million in 2004 to settle three class-action lawsuits involving overtime pay. As a consequence of a 2007 investigation, CKE agreed to pay $60,000 to 400 employees whom it had underpaid by violating overtime rules. From 2006 to 2014 the company spent $20 million on overtime lawsuits in California and had to reclassify many of its managers as the hourly workers they actually were.
Overtime rules aren't the only ones that Mr. Puzder's company has a problem obeying. In the past 16 years, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Cal OSHA have cited Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. locations for at least 98 safety violations. Thirty-six of these OSHA labeled “serious.” Which means the violation was one the employer should have been aware of because it could have severely harmed or killed a worker. Fines in those 98 cases were at first assessed at $119,975, but they were negotiated down to $67,290.
If confirmed, Mr. Puzder will be charged with enforcing the rules and possibly suing businesses like Hardee's, perhaps even Hardee's itself, for failing to pay workers their due. Christine Owens, the director of the National Employment Law Project, spotlighted the obvious conflict-of-interest having a fast-food executive charged with enforcing wage laws would create. She said: “Puzder will be there for his low-wage-industry CEO buddies, who are now salivating over the prospect of rolling back the Obama administration’s efforts to raise pay for low-wage workers, improve workplace safety, and increase corporate accountability for wage theft and other violations.”
It is hard to image Mr. Puzder fulfilling any of the objectives found in the Department of Labor's century-old mission. The Labor post demands someone who takes seriously the needs, and rights, and worries of workers. It is obvious Andrew Puzder is not the man for the job.
Timothy Lange (aka Meteor Blades), Senior Staff Writer, Daily Kos