Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants Holdings Inc., which owns fast food chains like Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, is expected to be Trump’s pick to run the Department of Labor. It’s hard to think of someone who has been a worse advocate for workers over his career. Puzder consistently rails against raising the minimum wage, even to just $9 an hour, and advocates for rolling back regulations on corporations. He also opposed President Obama’s new overtime rules. When investigated by the DOL, more than half of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants examined had at least one wage and hours violation. And, according to Talk Poverty, Puzder makes more in one day than one of his minimum wage employees makes in an entire year.
If he could, Puzder would replace all those pesky human workers with robots anyways because, in his own words, robots 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.”
Puzder isn’t foreign to such cases. Do you remember those sexist Carl’s Jr. ads featuring blonde women eating burgers in bikinis that tons of women found offensive? Puzder defended the ads, saying that he was shooting for the “young hungry guy” demographic. As he told Entrepreneur magazine, “I’m 64, I want to be a young hungry guy. Some young ladies in your age group like to date young hungry guys.” This “young” hungry guy is now going to be in charge of our country’s labor policy.