This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Washington • Labor Department employees have circulated a letter urging Senate committee members to vote against Andrew Puzder, President Donald Trump's nominee for labor secretary.
The letter, posted on Facebook, says "three specific factors disqualify Mr. Puzder from serving as the head of an agency whose primary mission is to protect America's workforce: (1) Mr. Puzder's own business practices; (2) his derisive public comments about his restaurants' employees and other low-wage workers; and (3) his equally troubling public comments and behavior toward women."
Puzder's nomination, now being considered by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, was already in trouble because four Republican senators are not committed to supporting him.
If he doesn't get the votes of Susan Collins of Maine, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Tim Scott of South Carolina, all members of the HELP committee, his nomination is all but dead.
It is not clear how many people have signed the letter or if it was sent. An email circulated by the "The Letter Drafting Committee" says it originally hoped to get the signatures of 200 employees, but "we are not confident we will be able to hit that target. Unfortunately, we are not surprised: We talked to numerous friends and colleagues who quite understandably feared signing. We wish they'd done so, but we don't blame them." The letter committee revised the goal to 100 current and 100 former Labor Department staffers.
The letter says the employees "are alarmed that Mr. Puzder has presided over a company, CKE Restaurants, whose franchises have repeatedly been found responsible by the Department for violating employment laws . . . Hardee's and Carl's Jr. have had more federal discrimination lawsuits brought against them since 2000, when Mr. Puzder took over, than any other major hamburger chain."
The staffers were "particularly disturbed by Mr. Puzder's widely publicized comment that replacing employees with automated machines would be desirable because 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.'"
It is not increasing automation that concerns the Labor Department workers, but Puzder's "insensitivity to employees' rights, their needs as human beings, and the importance of protections against discrimination."