Andy Puzder, Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Labor, is pretty darn controversial. The main reason, of course, is that labor interests naturally conflict with managerial or business interests. It’s an adversary relationship — no matter how much a worker wants to be friendly with management, it’ll eventually impede his or her ability to get meaningful and beneficial reform passed.
Historically, what works for the business doesn’t work for the union and vice versa. That’s not a radical thing to say, trust me. The largest and most vocal opponent of minimum wage, unions and workplace protections still is big business. They were on the frontlines, fighting against the child labor laws put into place in the 1910s, against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, against air traffic controllers in the 1980s and against teacher unions in Wisconsin in 2013. Today, they oppose the proposed $15 minimum wage, federal workplace discrimination laws and health benefits for workers. No matter how “chill” a CEO is (looking at you, Starbucks and Lyft), he or she is still a CEO. Profits and commercial success has to come first, and I don’t mean that as a bad thing. It’s just a fact.
Andy Puzder comes from business. He’s lived, breathed and bled business since he took control of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, in 2000. Asking him to lead a department, which he has spent 17 years in direct conflict with, is like asking a cat to lead the Department of Mice or an eraser to lead the Department of Pencils. I can go on, but you get the picture.
On top of his conflicting business interests, Puzder’s company has a reputation for regularly violating labor regulations and protection that are set up by the very department he’s poised to lead. In California, for example, service workers are guaranteed by a legislation to take breaks if their shifts are long. Puzder, of course, opposes it. The legislation breaks, he argues, conflict with customer surges, and customers will likely get antsy and lines unbearably long. So his workers don’t get breaks.
Why is Puzder a serious problem, though? All of Trump’s picks ascribe to philosophies antithetical to their departments; going after them for that has proved fruitless thus far. Well, I subscribe to the philosophy that economic struggle is and in many ways has always been the great American issue — the pinnacle of struggle, the deciding factor, the turning point. Large parts of the American Constitution and government were structured solely to prevent another Shays’ Rebellion. Slavery developed largely out of the economic dependence of the South on “king cotton.” The Great Depression shaped and molded the entire role and power of government in the 20th century. Focusing on acquiring economic justice for all is how Democrats are going to win over certain Trump voters. It is sex equality. It is racial justice. It touches every person in some way or another.
Unions lead that fight. Leaving them to vie for survival under Puzder and Trump is not only a disservice, but it chips away at economic prosperity across the United States. When normal people do poorly, we all do poorly — that’s Keynesian economics for you. Unions see to it that our middle classes are taken care of, that they can live on their wages, that when they get sick they have a hospital to go to and that their kids can go to college. It is now the job of Trump resistance to see to it that the unions are taken care of, that they can collective bargain, that they can strike and that they are strong and efficient. That means voting down Right to Work legislations. It means working with the Fight for $15 movement. And of course, it means that we fight tooth and nail against Puzder.
