By Yasmeen Holmes
While TV pundits debate the political and financial market implications of President Trump’s pick for secretary of labor, I worry how it will impact my family and millions of other low-wage workers, who Andrew Puzder has deemed not worthy of a $15 minimum wage, overtime or sick pay.
As the CEO of CKE Restaurants, Puzder makes 294 times what an average person earning the minimum wage makes in a year.
So how could he possibly understand my struggle? I am a single mother from Newark raising five children and one grandchild. I work at Newark Liberty International Airport. The pay is low, but I take pride in my work.
I am also proud that contracted airport workers like me have finally made some gains.
After years of fighting for respect and a voice at work, we recently won our first union contract. This is a tremendous victory that was possible because workers and our employers– a handful of airline contractors – were willing to sit down and bargain in good faith.
But there are thousands of other subcontracted airport workers at Newark Airport who have yet to realize this dream. As a result, they’re vulnerable — at risk of getting shortchanged on work hours, pay, discrimination, harassment and a host of other illegal actions that workers often face if they’re dealing with an unscrupulous or irresponsible employer.
There are federal laws to protect workers. But I fear these laws will not be enforced or they could be weakened if Puzder becomes labor secretary.
Consider Puzder’s far right views and track record in the fast-food industry and you’ll understand my uneasiness.
Under Puzder’s leadership at CKE Restaurants, the company that runs Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast food chains, wage and hour officials at the Department of Labor found violations 60 percent of the time they investigated those two chains since 2009, according to Bloomberg. That’s alarming, especially when you consider how little fast food workers are paid.
Asking Puzder, whose company has a troubling history of wage theft violations, to crack down on this kind of abuse is a conflict of interest. It’s like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
There are other red flags. Puzder told the Los Angeles Times in 2016, “There’s no way in the world that scooping ice cream is worth $15 an hour, and no one ever intended it would ever be something a person could raise a family on.”
What he fails to realize is that these low-wage service-oriented jobs require a lot more work than JUST scooping ice cream. And that a significant number of fast-food workers are adults with families, not teenagers who live at home and work a summer job to earn a little extra money.
Puzder is also a vocal critic of a host of other policies that low-wage workers like me deserve and need to have a decent life. Among them, the Department of Labor’s new overtime rules, federal government assistance programs like SNAP or food stamps and federal housing assistance. And he has strong views against the Affordable Care Act. So it’s not surprising that Puzder doesn’t offer benefits to the franchise employees of the fast-food restaurants his company runs — only corporate employees receive benefits.
Puzder’s history and anti-worker beliefs should give us all pause and raise questions about his ability to objectively fulfill the Department of Labor’s mission, which 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.”
As federal lawmakers consider whether to approve Puzder’s nomination, I ask them to remember my family and the tens of millions of other Americans whose lives hang in the balance if they choose Puzder as the next scretary of the Labor Department.
Yasmeen Holmes is a member of 32BJ, the largest property services union in the country with 163,000 members in 11 states including 12,000 in New Jersey.
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