USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!!

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today, hundreds of fast-food workers plan to converge on the corporate offices of labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder and demand the fast-food mogul withdraw his nomination. Puzder is head of the company that franchises the fast-food outlets Hardee's and Carl's Jr. He's a longtime Republican donor who's been a vocal critic of raising the minimum wage, of the Fight for 15 movement, of expansion of overtime pay, and of paid sick leave and the Affordable Care Act. Puzder's Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday. The hearing has been postponed four times previously. Last week, Puzder became the second of Trump's Cabinet nominees to acknowledge hiring an undocumented worker. The first was commerce secretary nominee and billionaire Wilbur Ross. Similar practices have led to the rejection of past Cabinet nominees, including two of President Clinton's nominees for attorney general in 1993.
AMY GOODMAN: The Riverfront Times in St. Louis also reports that Andrew Puzder was accused of abusing his former wife multiple times. Puzder's ex-wife even went on Oprah decades ago in disguise to speak about the domestic violence.
Meanwhile, a recent survey by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United has found a shocking two-thirds of women working at Puzder's restaurants experience sexual harassment at work. One-third of Puzder workers said they've had some of their wages stolen or not received required breaks. The report also called into question the food safety standards at Puzder's restaurants, with nearly 80 percent of Puzder workers saying they had prepared or served food while they were sick.
Well, for more, we go now to Washington, D.C., where we're joined by Saru Jayaraman, who is co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, known as ROC United. Their new report is titled "Secretary of Labor Violations?: The Low Road Business Model of CKE Restaurant Inc's Andrew Puzder." And in Los Angeles, we're joined by Maggie Guerrero, who worked as a shift leader at a Carl's Jr. for two years.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Saru, I believe that the date has now been set for Thursday for Puzder's confirmation hearing, put off five times. It is quite astounding. Can you talk about your concerns about the head of Carl's and Hardee's becoming the secretary of labor under Donald Trump?
SARU JAYARAMAN: Absolutely. First, it has to be understood that as the leader of CKE restaurant chains, Andy Puzder is not just a CEO of a fast-food company, he's also a leader in the National Restaurant Association, a trade lobby that has essentially lobbied for almost a century to keep wages as low as inhumanely possible, including keeping wages for fast-food workers at $7.25 and tipped workers at $2.13 an hour. Today is actually our annual day of action, 2/13, to highlight the fact that the wage has been stuck at $2.13 an hour for a quarter-century. And it's that kind of policy that the National Restaurant Association and Andy Puzder have been lobbying for successfully for the last many, many decades.
Now, in his own restaurants, Andy Puzder not only, you know, has said, "I wish I could replace these workers with robots. You know, I don't actually believe in the minimum wage at all," but has been found in very serious violation, not only by our report, which was pretty overwhelming, but also by the very department that he is now charged to run. The Department of Labor has found that more than half of his restaurants were in violation of basic wage and hour laws, like not paying overtime, not payingnot providing breaks, workers working off the clock and, worst of all, as you mentioned, just incredible amounts of sexual harassment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Saru, on this issue of his stance on the minimum wage and the Fight for 15, here he is, Andy Puzder, on Fox Business News in 2015.

ANDREW PUZDER: If your concern is to create entry-level jobs for young Americans, then a $15 minimum wage is something you should be protesting against. And thisDr. Carson brought this up. Labor participation for minority youth is really very low. My friend Art Laffer and I had an article in Investor's Business Daily on that about a year and a half ago. But even if you look at labor participation for 16-to-19-year-olds for every race, the reality is that we've hit four historic lows this year, and they'veand that goes back to when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started recording the data in 1948. So, fewer young people are working or looking for work than has been the case since 1948. If your objective is to bolster and support the unions, and you're not all that concerned about whether young people will have entry-level jobs, then you should be protesting in favor of a $15 minimum wage. And I think most people are concerned about young people in this country, and fewer people are concerned about big labor.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Andy Puzder on Fox Business in 2015. Last year, in an interview with Business Insider, labor secretary nominee Puzder sang the praises of restaurant automation. He saidhe's quoted as saying that machines are, quote, "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." In other words, robots are completely docile workers, as far as he's concerned.
SARU JAYARAMAN: Exploitable. I mean, the fact thatyou know, when we did this survey, we did it over the holidays, the busiest time for restaurant workers, and 900 workers from his company reached out to usit was overwhelmingover a two-week period. Five hundred and sixty-four filled out these surveys, and two-thirds of a mostly female workforce said they experienced very scary, pretty horrific sexual harassment. You've heard about the ads at Carl's Jr., with nearly naked women. And young women reported in our survey being asked by customers, "Why aren't you dressed like the women in the ads? I'll take you anyway," and then following them out into the parking lots, grabbing them, touching them, and workers complaining about these things, and management doing nothing at all. So, yes, if you want a robot who's willing to be touched and not complain about it, you know, I suppose that's the direction you want to go. But clearly, he hasn't done that. He hasn't automated his restaurants. He still has tens of thousands of workers in his restaurants. And they are obviously really suffering, or they wouldn't have reached out to us in the way that they did.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about this argument that with a lower minimum wage, you have a greater workforce participation rate in the country?
SARU JAYARAMAN: Yeah, what's amazing about that is that our industry right now is actually going through the worst labor shortage in the history of our industry in every major metropolitan area, even as wages are going up. The plurality of his restaurants are in California, where wages are going up to $15, and we are experiencing in California the worst labor shortage in the history of the United States in the restaurant industry. And so, you know, the contrary is true: Jobs continue to grow in this industry at ever-increasing rates, even as wages are going up.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about his other activities. He's not only a businessman, as you say, a leader of the Restaurant Association, but he's also very active in other conservative Republican issues. Are you aware or knowledgeable about some of those?
SARU JAYARAMAN: Yes. I mean, he's been very ideological on issues of choice and, you know, all kinds of issues pertaining to women. He has actually supported mostly Republican, but some Democrats, as well, on these issues, and, through the National Restaurant Association, has spent millions of dollars to prevent the minimum wage from going up and other worker protections, has fought against healthcare reform, against policies like paid sick days. So this is a man who, you know, paid like $700,000 towards the Trump campaign, a very ideological Republican capitalist that reallyyou have to understand, with Andy Puzder going into the head of the Department of Labor, that's essentially giving this trade lobby, that has been lobbying really since slavery times to keep wages as low as possible, if notyou know, or not have them at allyou're essentially giving the National Restaurant Association a seat in the Cabinet and the complete control over the very department that is supposed to be looking out for the welfare of workers.
AMY GOODMAN: During an appearance on Fox News's Fox & Friends in 2015, Andy Puzder claimed many workers don't want higher wages, because they're afraid of losing government benefits. This is Puzder speaking to Steve Doocy on Fox.

ANDREW PUZDER: The policy guys call it the welfare cliff, because you get to a point where if you make a few more dollars, you actually lose thousands of dollars in benefits.

STEVE DOOCY: Right.

ANDREW PUZDER: And quite honestly, these benefits are essential for some people. They're how they pay the rent. They're how they feed their kids.

STEVE DOOCY: Sure.

ANDREW PUZDER: So, what happens is, we have people who turn down promotions, or, if minimum wage goes up, they want fewer hours. They want less hours because they're afraid they'll go over that cliff

STEVE DOOCY: Sure.

ANDREW PUZDER: and really make the distance between dependence and independence too broad a gap.

STEVE DOOCY: And it's got to drive you nuts, because

ANDREW PUZDER: Yes.

STEVE DOOCY: you're always looking for good people to run your stores. And if they would just take the next step, take thea next step up the ladder, next thing you know, they could be a manager making $80,000, but they don't want to lose the free stuff from the government.

ANDREW PUZDER: Yeah, it reallyit really locks people into poverty. It's a system that doesit just isit was well-intended, intended to relieveto help people who need relief, but it really locks them into poverty, and we need a different system.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Andrew Puzder on Fox & Friends with Steve Doocy. Saru Jayaraman, your response?
SARU JAYARAMAN: The amazing thing about these comments is that they are essentially admitting that they, as not just CKE, but as an industry, are relying on taxpayer dollars for the survival of their workers. The kinds of benefits they're talking about are food stamps, Medicaid, all kinds of public assistance that these workers rely on because their wages are absurdly low. And the real solution is not to find a way to allow these workers to continue to rely on these taxpayer-funded benefits, but to pay them enough that they can actually survive without benefits, which is what most of these workers want. In fact, the taxpayer pays $16.5 billion on taxpayer-funded benefits just for this one industry alone. And so, it's important to realize that the National Restaurant Association argues both to keep the minimum wage as low as possible, and argues against raising the minimum wage because these workers need benefits, which they are essentially relying on to subsidize their workers' wages and survival. It's an unsustainable business model, and the real solution is to raise the wage to the point where the workers don't have to rely on benefits at all.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, it's unsustainable for everyone but the corporate executives, right?
SARU JAYARAMAN: That's right. That's right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Because Puzder made about $4.4 million in 2012?
SARU JAYARAMAN: In some years, it's estimated he's made as much as $10 million. If you look at the reimbursements he's received for his own medical expenses, they're pretty extraordinary. They're larger than some workers' wages in a whole year, just for his medical reimbursements. So, it's incredibly hypocritical.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about this new controversy that's come out, Andy Puzder facing increasing criticism over his admission that he hired an undocumented housekeeper. Puzder says he and his wife employed an undocumented housekeeper for a number of years, then fired her after learning she didn't have U.S. work documents. And in the midst of, you know, him being considered for secretary of labor is when he fired her. He also says they provided her help in obtaining U.S. documentation. Puzder is the second of Trump's Cabinet nominees who has acknowledged hiring an undocumented worker. The first was commerce secretary nominee billionaire Wilbur Ross. Similar practices have led to the rejection of past Cabinet nominees, like two of President Clinton's nominees for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, in 1993. Saru, your response, for his hiring of the undocumented housekeeper and what happened next in this issue across, whoever does this?
SARU JAYARAMAN: I think the key question is: If this man didn't know that his domestic worker was undocumented, then why didn't he pay taxes for her employment from the first place? Why did he, when he said he learned about her status, then go say he went back and paid back taxes? The truth is that this man employs millions of undocumented workers. The industry employs millions of undocumented workers. The industry relies on immigrants, both undocumented and documented. The National Restaurant Association has said many, many times that the industry would collapse without these workers.
The real question is: Under what conditions do these workers survive and work in this country? The administration, in the same breath as bringing on this man, who has now said he definitely had an undocumented domestic worker and has many more in his companyin the same breath, is, you know, saying that they're going to get rid of millions of undocumented workers. You know, when you put the National Restaurant Association, which has said so many times that its industry would collapse without these workers, in charge of a Cabinet position, you know that they don't really actually want to get rid of these workers. They want to create a climate of fear, in which workers, like robots, won't speak up, won't complain about anything at all. That's really what's going on here. It's a bit of a schizophrenic kind of policy, in which you have one man in charge of workers, who has hired undocumented workers and says he prefers robots, and on the other hand, the administration is going out, engaging in raids, talking about immigration enforcement, when in fact we all know that these CEOs absolutely depend on these workers, not just as domestic workers, but in their companies, to do the work to make the millions that they want to make.
AMY GOODMAN: And the accusation against Puzder of domestic abuse by his ex-wife, who even went on Oprah in disguise to speak about his domestic violence? In a 1988 petition, the ex-wife, Lisa Fierstein said Puzder had, quote, "assaulted and battered [her] by striking her violently about the face, chest, back, shoulders, and neck, without provocation or cause," and that, as a consequence, she suffered severe and permanent injuries. His ex-wife would later withdraw the allegations as part of a 1990 child custody agreement. But, Saru, how does this fit in?
SARU JAYARAMAN: You know, I won't comment to what happened to his wife, since she withdrew her charges. I will say it's important to keep that in mind as you look at the ads. You've seen these ads of Carl's Jr. restaurants in which they have nearly naked women holding up burgers in front of their breasts or lying on the floor eating a burger or feeding burgers to each other in naked positions. And then you look at the data from our report and other reports showing that young women, often very young women, 16-, 17-, 18-year-old girls, were harassed, grabbed, assaulted in various ways, as I said, told by customers, "Why aren't you dressed like the girls in the ads?"
Clearly, this is a man who doesn't respect women at all, is fine with women being degraded in his ads, and has said, "Well, ugly women don't sell burgers," and then is also fine with young women being assaulted in his restaurants when they're trying to do their job. I mean, two-thirds of women in our survey said that they had been sexually harassed in various ways. That's 1.5 times the rate of the rest of the industry, which already, by the way, has five times the rate of sexual harassment of the entire rest of the economy. So you're talking about the worst sexual violator of any company in an industry that's already the worst sexual harasser of any industry. And this is the man who's in charge of the welfare of women workers in our country. It's horrific.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Saru, while we have you on, as an organizer of the restaurantas an organizer of ROC, I wanted to ask you about these raids across the country, over 600 people. In a moment, we're going to speak to the Senate president in California. The effect on working people in Carl's, in Hardee's, all over the country, and beyond, of course, what this has meant?
SARU JAYARAMAN: Yeah, this industry, as I said, is the largest employer of undocumented workers, of immigrants of all different kinds and Muslim immigrants. And what we are seeing is that these raids, these actions, are really meant to strike fear in the heart of workers, to keep them from speaking up, to keep them from doing anything that would expose themselves or make themselves a target. And what we need to do as a nation, as an industry, is stand up. Many of our employers have come forward and formed something called sanctuary restaurants, not saying that they're going to harbor undocumented immigrants, but really saying they're going to stand by their workers of all identities. And we, as workers, just need to continue to resist, because we can't allow them to think that we're going to roll over and be afraid when they engage in these kinds of actions, which is precisely their point. So, actually, on March 8th, International Women's Day, we are calling for a national action on the Department of Labor. We will be gathering in front of the Department of Labor with thousands of women workers from across the country.