Carl’s Jr. CEO Concern-Trolls Workers Whose Jobs He Wants to Automate

Danger, Will Robinson: I’m coming for your job!

Writing in an op-ed on Forbes.com, Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s CEO Andy Puzder warns about “The Harsh Reality of Regulating Overtime Pay.”

Turning highly sought-after entry level management careers into hourly jobs where employees punch a clock and are compensated for time spent rather than time well spent is hardly an improvement on the path from the working class to the middle class.

“Highly sought-after entry level management careers,” my ass. During my coverage of the fast food strikes in 2013, I heard from a number of fast food workers who turned down “assistant manager” promotions because the extra 50 cents an hour wasn’t worth the extra 20 hours a week of unpaid overtime work. But either way, Puzder’s alleged concern for employee welfare is nothing short of ironic coming from a guy who fondly muses about the idea of replacing all of his workers with 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.

What a charmer.

The harsh reality is that CEOs like Puzder couldn’t give a shit about the welfare of their employees (let alone the welfare of their franchisees’ employees). “Millennials like not seeing people,” Puzder explained to Business Insider in describing his robotized utopia. So if he could have automated all his workers out of their jobs, he’d already have done so.

But he can’t. So he hasn’t. Likewise, you can be sure that if Puzder could run his restaurants with fewer employees working fewer hours he already would be. So don’t expect to see any overtime-rule-induced mass layoffs at Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s anytime soon.

Of course, it’s not just Puzder wiping away crocodile tears on behalf of the 12.5 million Americans who will soon be forced to endure higher pay for fewer hours at the cold unfeeling hands of government bureaucrats. Paul’s got a rundown of various conservative objections to the new higher overtime threshold, and frankly, they all strike me as rather weird. Most bizarre is the repeated assertion that salaried workers would somehow prefer to go unpaid for their overtime hours rather than suffer the humiliation of having to “punch in” like a lowly hourly prole. “Forcing More Workers to Punch a Clock Isn’t Progress,” cries Koch-funded Carrie Lucas at the National Review.

Oy. Speaking of things I’d like to punch.

Puzder proudly describes himself as a member of the Job Creators Network—a network with close ties to notorious D.C. public relations firm Berman and Company, and from the looks of their landing page, apparently consists of rich old white men concern-trolling on behalf of the young off-white workers they pay poverty wages. (Um, maybe they should’ve focused-grouped their website’s white-man-on-top motif?)

2015 Webby Awards winner for “Most Condescending Landing Page”

But Puzder and his Job Creators Network buddies aren’t really interested in creating jobs at all. Quite the opposite. Like all self-interested businesspeople, they’re focused on minimizing their labor costs as much as possible. And if that means a brave new world of employee-free restaurants, Puzder is eager to embrace the future without an ounce of regret: “I want to try it,” he told Business Insider.

So enough already with this paternalistic bullshit about defending “entry-level” workers from the dangers of higher wages and more benefits. It just isn’t believable. And it never has been.