Andrew Puzder, Labor Secretary?

The mission of the Department of Labor is “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.”

By this standard, Andrew Puzder is perhaps the worst choice for Labor Secretary in modern history.

Here are some of the lowlights of Puzder’s long anti-worker history:

• Took issue with mandatory rest and meal break requirements for workers, as well as mandatory sick leave
• Suggested replacing workers in the fast food industry with robots because:

Robots “never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip and fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.” —Andrew Puzder

• Criticized any effort to raise the federal minimum wage (which is currently $7.25, falling embarrassingly short of a living wage standard), and doubled down on Trump’s baseless claim that “wages are too high”
• Actively opposed the Affordable Care Act and claimed it caused a “restaurant recession,” hurting job growth in the food industry (fact check — there’s absolutely no evidence of this)

It’s easy for Puzder to sit back and oppose raising the minimum wage and deny his employees something as simple as lunch breaks or sick leave when he reportedly earns 291 times more than his lowest-paid worker.

Not only is Puzder himself bad for workers, but the company he runs has a poor record of standing up for ordinary Americans. The Obama Labor Department found labor law violations in 60% of the complaints it investigated at Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. Those violations usually entailed failure to pay the minimum wage or failure to pay overtime to workers. In fact, Puzder’s company has settled many class action suits, paying out over $20 million in the past eight years alone, in part over allegations that it failed to pay managers overtime.

As Labor Secretary, Puzder would be tasked with leading the fight to defend the Obama administration’s update to the rules for overtime pay. Overtime rules haven’t been fully adjusted for inflation since the 1970s, so the updated rules are long-overdue help to working families. They have been challenged in court, and Puzder has no record of standing up and fighting for American workers. He even said that overtime pay makes workers “less economically-efficient.”

We know that Puzder is looking out for two things: robots and his own bottom line. How can we trust Puzder to do the right thing for middle and working-class Americans? The truth is — we can’t. Make sure everyone knows why Trump’s Secretary of Labor pick would be harmful to working Americans by sharing this post on Twitter and Facebook.