Hiring Undocumented Workers

Andy Puzder is a terrible human being. He opposes the minimum wage. He is an unreconstructed sexist. He wants to lay off every fast food worker and replace them with machines. He was a leading opponent of the Obama administration’s attempt to hold fast food companies accountable for the franchisees, as well as of every other thing Obama and Tom Perez and David Weil and the rest of that excellent Department of Labor did to make the lives of workers better. He will be an utterly atrocious Secretary of Labor, a right-wing extremist who will seek to take us back to Gilded Age wages and working conditions. I wish for nothing more than the defeat of his nomination to this fascist Cabinet.

But of all the things I will not attack him for, it’s hiring an undocumented worker to clean his house. An undocumented worker is a worker. That worker deserves to be treated with respect. We need to open the borders to ensure that no workers are undocumented and Andy Puzder is not going to do that. For that reason among so many others, I strongly oppose his nomination. But I am highly uncomfortable with a campaign to defeat him based on the fact that he hired an undocumented worker. To me, this keeps the millions of undocumented people behind the curtain, fearful to be found out or caught, when they need to be integrated into society and accepted as the workers and human beings that they are.