Elizabeth Warren takes aim at Labor nominee Andrew Puzder
WASHINGTON — The week after her high-profile showdown over President Trump’s pick for attorney general, Elizabeth Warren is gearing up for another round — this time with her sights trained on fast food chief executive Andrew Puzder, the president’s nominee to head the Department of Labor.
Warren this morning fired off a 28-page letter with 83 questions for Puzder, the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, which runs fast food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., ahead of his Feb. 16 confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. But there’s little chance his answers will sway Warren, who sits on that panel.
“My staff’s review of your 16-year tenure . . . reveals that you’ve made your fortune by squeezing the very workers you’d be charged with protecting as Labor Secretary out of wages and benefits,” Warren writes in the opening paragraphs of the letter. She goes on to raise concerns about Puzder’s company’s “record of prolific labor law abuses and discrimination suits” and his own “long record of public comments [that] reveals a sneering contempt for the workers in your stores, and a vehement opposition to the laws you will be charged with enforcing.”
Nonetheless, she says the letter is necessary because the HELP committee’s GOP chairman plans to limit each senator to only a few minutes of questions — and she has a lot of questions about his fitness for the job.
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