Puzder was once accused by ex-wife of abuse

Surely if there’s a cabinet post central to the future prospects of women, it is the Department of Labor. Its mission statement: “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 workrelated benefits and rights.”

A conscious person, by which I mean a person who is awake, might think the CEO of a burger chain known for its ever more risqué television commercials might not be that person.

Yet here we have Andy Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants, awaiting his confirmation hearing Thursday. If Puzder’s CV has anything to do with it, the proceedings should be combustive.

CKE is the parent company to the burger chain Carl’s Jr., home of the “1⁄2- pound Budweiser Beer Cheese Bacon Thick Burger.” It’s not the 990 calories that raise alarms in this context. It’s the images of a conga line of all but naked models bouncing their cantilevered breasts through Carl’s Jr. commercials.

In an interview with Marketing magazine two years ago, Puzder said he wasn’t bothered by viewer complaints. “If you don’t complain, I go to the head of marketing and say, ‘What’s wrong with our ads?’ . . . What you look at is, you look at sales. And, our sales go up.”

How well the “beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis” formula has worked for the company, I can’t say. CKE was once a publicly traded company that ran into a pile of financial woes under founder and leader Carl Karcher. Puzder, a lawyer and by his own admission not an operations guy, became CEO in 2000. The company’s last securities filings, before it went private, stated that CKE was controlled by Apollo Global Management, which “has the ability to elect all of the members of our board of directors.”

At the time the company had eight directors — all men. So if we’re looking for standard bearers for women in high places, this isn’t it.

The Roark Capital Group acquired a majority stake in CKE from Apollo in 2013. In its last quarterly filings before it was taken private, CKE noted that its “most significant legal disputes relate to employee meal and rest break disputes, and wage and hour disputes,” allegations that the company said it would vigorously defend.

Puzder remains CEO and his public financial disclosure report, filed with the executive branch, indicate that his CKE holdings could be worth more than $60 million (U.S.)

In that Marketing interview, he aligned himself closely with the Carl’s message: “I used to hear, brands take on the personality of the CEO. And I rarely thought that was true, but I think this one, in this case, it kind of did take on my personality.”

As Secretary of Labor, Puzder will oversee a department mandated to implement and enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage, overtime protections), to break down barriers against equal opportunity in the workplace, to enforce the Occupational Health and Safety Act and more.

No doubt his 2014 Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing against an increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 (U.S.) an hour from $7.25, where it remains still, will be raised.

Perhaps his prior employment of an undocumented immigrant will come up. Perhaps the allegations laid against him by his ex-wife will come up. He “attacked me, choked me, threw me to the floor, hit me in the head, pushed his knee into my chest, twisted my arm and dragged me on the floor, threw me against a wall, tried to stop my call to 911 and kicked me in the back,” Lisa Hen- ning, now Fierstein, claimed in divorce filings.

Those charges were first reported by the Riverfront Times, a St. Louis paper, in 1989, under the headline “Prominent anti-abortion warrior has had a family battle of his own.”

The point of the story was to pry the lid back on Puzder’s private life in the context of his having been chosen to help write Missouri’s anti-abortion statute. As a representative of the National Abortion Rights Action League asked, “Should someone like Puzder recommend policy for all the women and children in Missouri?”

In an email sent by Fierstein to her ex-husband last November, provided to the Riverfront Times, Fierstein writes that she was “counselled then to file an allegation of abuse. I regretted and still regret that decision and I withdrew those allegations over thirty years ago. You were not abusive . . . I know you would be an excellent addition to the Trump team.” (Subsequent to the charges, Fierstein appeared in disguise on the Oprah Winfrey Show in a segment on “high class” battered women that aired in March 1990.)

That’s quite the load of laundry Puzder will be hauling before Thursday’s confirmation hearing. I wonder if it makes our own Chrystia Freeland squirm, even a little bit, to contemplate the real business behind the women-friendly photoOPS. jenwells@thestar.ca

If Andy Puzder’s CV is brought up at his confirmation hearing, the proceedings should be combustive