When it comes time to hold a confirmation hearing for Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary, Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chair Lamar Alexander doesn’t want to hear from the workers who’ve experienced Puzder’s leadership at the fast food chain he runs. So Sen. Elizabeth Warren invited some Carl’s Jr. workers to meet with her to talk about what it’s like:
"Mr. Pudzer took a company that I loved and turned it into a business that makes money by stealing from its workers," Laura McDonald, a former 20-year employee at Carl's Jr., told the hearing. "I honestly can't think of anyone less qualified to enforce laws that are supposed to protect employees."
McDonald and two other Carl's Jr. employees offered emotional testimonies about their poor working conditions and struggles to get by on a Carl's Jr. salary. Lupe Guzman, a 47-year-old single mother of six who runs the graveyard shift at a Carl's Jr. in Las Vegas, told the senators about surviving on $8.75 per hour in a job she's held for seven years. She said employees don't take breaks mandated by state law and alleged that paychecks excluded hours she'd worked. She also said she's been held up at gunpoint twice, and the company never inquired about her well-being, just whether anything had been stolen. "I mean nothing to them," she said through tears. "I'm just somebody who covers a shift that nobody wants. All they care about is protecting their money."
One of the workers reported that, despite having a job at Carl’s Jr., she needed housing assistance, food stamps, and Medicaid, because her job does not pay enough to live on. It’s a common experience of workers in fast food and retail, and it’s the sort of thing you’d think a labor secretary or legislator might want to fix—by enforcing labor laws or raising the minimum wage—but instead, congressional Republicans and Andy Puzder alike blame workers for the abuses of their employers.
"I also want to say loud and clear about what this means," Warren said in the hearing. "That a giant corporation would build its entire business model around squeezing workers like you…and then count on the taxpayers to come up with food stamps, to come up with housing assistance, to come up with Medicaid. To come up with all the help that you need just barely to hold it together, so they can maximize their profits. This is just not right in America. I believe in capitalism, but I believe that these companies need to pay the full cost of keeping their workers working."
Puzder’s confirmation hearing has been postponed by weeks, and it’s not clear if that means his likelihood of confirmation has decreased. But in a way, he’s perfect. Any Trump labor secretary is going to go out of his way to screw workers, but Puzder is such a flaming poster child for abuses that whatever little bit worse he might be than a replacement is offset by the ease of being able to point out that Trump put a cartoon villain of a fast food CEO in charge of labor law enforcement in this country. The Trump regime will be heads-I-win-tails-you-lose for working people, but we might as well at least be able to point to the labor secretary and have it come through loud and clear that this was what Trump wanted all along.