The Slatest

Trump Wants to Make a Fast Food CEO the Secretary of Labor

Hardee's GA
A Hardee’s location in Moultrie, Georgia.

Michael Rivera/Wikimedia Commons

Here’s the news:

If your reaction to this is that the CEO of a fast food company is perhaps a suboptimal choice to lead the department that’s in charge of protecting workers’ rights, Puzder’s CV will not dissuade you. He’s on the board of the International Franchise Association, which systematically opposes efforts to raise the minimum wage; he’s also criticized the Obama administration for expanding the number of American workers who are covered by overtime rules and has said publicly that he’d like to open restaurants that are largely run by robots*:

“They’re 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,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

Carl’s Jr. is also well-known for advertisements that involve individuals such as Paris Hilton and Charlotte McKinney eating hamburgers in a way that suggests that the act of eating the hamburger has caused them, for some reason, to become urgently sexually aroused. Here’s one involving Cameron Richardson:

Screenshot/YouTube via Jezebel

Good stuff.

*Correction, Dec. 8, 2016: This post initially said that Puzder would like to open restaurants in which no humans are employed; his comments appear rather to have endorsed the use of robots for all roles that involve customer interaction.