Andy Puzder, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, hasn’t had his confirmation hearing yet, but with almost every day that goes by, more stories come out that Senate Democrats really need to ask the fast food CEO. Like this minimum wage story, reported by Will Evans at Reveal News:
He once spent $10,000 to oppose a pay bump of one dollar an hour.
Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company that franchises Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants, gave the money in 2006 to battle a Nevada ballot measure to raise the state minimum wage from $5.15 (the federal minimum wage at the time) to $6.15. The donation put him among the top 10 donors trying to prevent the wage increase, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
Despite big money from Puzder and others like him, nearly 69 percent of Nevada voters approved the minimum wage increase, because raising the minimum wage is very popular. The fact that Trump chose someone so strongly against it shows just how out of step with American voters Trump and his cabinet are.
Puzder doesn’t just want to underpay his workers. He has absolute contempt for them, as he showed in two 2011 speeches, bragging about how he’d improved the workforce at Hardee’s when he came on as CEO:
"In fast food, you sort of compete for the best of the worst," Puzder said. "In other words, you're not getting the Microsoft guys. At Hardee's we were getting the worst of the worst. Nobody wanted to work at Hardee's. It was complicated to work there, we had to change our network systems, our menu was too complicated we had to simplify it."
In public interviews Puzder has talked about his workers in more positive ways, but it’s not hard to tell what he really thinks. You look at what he does, and what he does is wage theft, poor working conditions, and opposition to raising the minimum wage.