Andy Puzder, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, hasn’t had his confirmation hearing yet, but with almost every day that goes by, more stories come out that Senate Democrats really need to ask the fast food CEO. Like this minimum wage story, reported by Will Evans at Reveal News:

He once spent $10,000 to oppose a pay bump of one dollar an hour.

Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company that franchises Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants, gave the money in 2006 to battle a Nevada ballot measure to raise the state minimum wage from $5.15 (the federal minimum wage at the time) to $6.15. The donation put him among the top 10 donors trying to prevent the wage increase, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Despite big money from Puzder and others like him, nearly 69 percent of Nevada voters approved the minimum wage increase, because raising the minimum wage is very popular. The fact that Trump chose someone so strongly against it shows just how out of step with American voters Trump and his cabinet are.

Puzder doesn’t just want to underpay his workers. He has absolute contempt for them, as he showed in two 2011 speeches, bragging about how he’d improved the workforce at Hardee’s when he came on as CEO:

"In fast food, you sort of compete for the best of the worst," Puzder said. "In other words, you're not getting the Microsoft guys. At Hardee's we were getting the worst of the worst. Nobody wanted to work at Hardee's. It was complicated to work there, we had to change our network systems, our menu was too complicated we had to simplify it."

In public interviews Puzder has talked about his workers in more positive ways, but it’s not hard to tell what he really thinks. You look at what he does, and what he does is wage theft, poor working conditions, and opposition to raising the minimum wage. 

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, got a high-speed, abbreviated confirmation hearing thanks to Republicans presumably wanting to protect her from embarrassment of the sort she managed anyway, with her defense of guns in schools because of “potential grizzlies.” Now, Senate Democrats are pushing for a second hearing for DeVos:

“Education is too important an issue, and the Secretary of Education is too important a position for the country and for this Committee, to jam a nominee through without sufficient questioning and scrutiny,” they wrote to Alexander in a letter Monday. “This is not about politics, it should not be about partisanship — it should be about doing the work we were elected by our states to do to ask questions of nominees on behalf of the people we represent.”

Those signing the letter included 10 Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats. They are all members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), which is overseeing DeVos’s confirmation.

A series of corporations have felt the lash of Donald Trump’s angry tweet, and Monday their CEOs trotted over to the White House to suck up to him. In return, they got some big promises.

His message to them and other CEOs on Monday: Keep your production within the United States, and you will be rewarded. For those looking to grow or start new factories, Trump promised to expedite their requests and provide incentives to build.

“Expedite their requests and provide incentives,” huh? That wouldn’t translate to “let them have their way and give them giant tax breaks and even taxpayer money,” would it? Yeah, I thought it might. In fact, Trump promised to cut their taxes “massively.”

Trump also promised to cut regulations, because preventing fatal diseases and amputations in the workplace and poisoned water in the community is such a burden for companies. But don’t worry, Trump’s replacement for the regulations that have done so much to clean our air and reduce workplace fatalities over the past decades will totally be just as good, while also being much, much less. And, of course, to show he’s a big dominant guy, Trump also threatened the corporate leaders with a tariff they all know he probably can’t impose. 

Trump said that he hopes to convene this group at least four times a year to hear directly from the business community, saying that they are “great people” who have done “an amazing job.”

I look forward to hearing about his equivalent four times a year meetings with union leaders or rank-and-file workers to hear directly about how wages and working conditions are faring under his leadership.

Teachers, students, and parents in 200 school districts nationwide protested on Thursday against Donald Trump’s pick of Betsy DeVos for education secretary. In Chicago:

Hundreds of Daniel Boone Elementary teachers, students and parents held hands and circled their school in Chicago's West Ridge neighborhood, as a sign of unity without any boundaries or walls.

"I believe this is a show not only to the neighborhood, but also to each other, where we stand. Because my fear is the message, the rhetoric, could turn communities against each other based on nothing," said Jennifer Gledhill, mother of a Boone third grader.

In Orlando:

Students staged a walkout Thursday at Lovell Elementary School as part of a protest. Students and teachers told News 6 that they want more emphasis placed on public schools, not less.

Rallies were also held in the Twin Cities, Newark, Miami, Los Angeles, and many more cities and towns.

Betsy DeVos has reached an ethics agreement with the government requiring her to divest from 102 different assets within 90 days of being confirmed as Donald Trump’s education secretary. Here’s the best part:

DeVos listed on her financial paperwork a holding company that invests in Performant Business Services, Inc., which the Education Department hires to collect defaulted federal student loans.

The probable future education secretary has been profiting from debt collection on student loans. What a commitment to affordable higher education and helping students avoid the burden of high debt! 

DeVos will also divest from a series of companies intended to profit off of education, from software to textbooks to campus parking.

Sign and send the petition to your senators: Block Betsy DeVos as education secretary.

Donald Trump proposes to put fast food CEO Andy Puzder in charge of the Department of Labor, where he could bring his program of wage theft, automation, and sexism to workers nationwide. Unions and worker advocacy groups are not so enthusiastic about this proposal, and one of the ways they’ve tried to register their concern is by tweeting at Puzder. This has revealed something new, interesting, and pathetic about the wealthy, powerful, outspoken political nominee: he has incredibly thin skin. Puzder has been steadily blocking his critics on Twitter:

The Hardees and Carl’s Jr. CEO has blocked the Twitter accounts of at least five labor advocacy groups. This week, he even blocked one of the country’s most prominent union leaders, Mary Kay Henry of the 2-million member Service Employees International Union.

“Yes, the Twitter news is true. A sentence I can’t believe I’m writing,” an SEIU spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday evening. The union is the second-largest in the country, and has been the main backer of the Fight For $15 movement to raise wages in the fast food industry.

As a veteran fast food leader opposed to wage hikes, Puzder’s beef with Henry and the SEIU seems clear. But he’s handing out the blocks more liberally than that. The cabinet nominee has also blocked the National Employment Law Project, the Economic Policy Institute, MoveOn.org, the Fight for $15, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — all organizations that advocate on behalf of workers, especially low-wage workers and workers of color.

These groups are sober, policy-focused, and polite. As NELP’s Judy Conti told Buzzfeed, “We’re not name-calling. There are no ad hominem attacks.” But Puzder apparently can’t even face being tweeted at about New York Times coverage of himself, at least if it’s a progressive think tank doing the tweeting. 

Just think: a labor secretary who doesn’t want to hear from pro-worker groups.

When is a Senate hearing popular viewing? When Elizabeth Warren is doing the questioning:

Make that 7.9 million in 15 hours. It’s not just that it’s Elizabeth Warren, though. The person struggling to answer Warren’s questions was Trump education nominee Betsy DeVos, and the subject was predatory for-profit colleges and universities.

Warren went in on Trump University, saying it made her “curious” how the Trump administration would protect students from waste, fraud, and abuse by for-profit colleges. DeVos’s answer: she’d have people for that. Would DeVos enforce rules like the gainful employment rule, which requires that career colleges are actually preparing students for jobs that exist, not cheating them by making big promises and leaving them with loads of debt and no job? DeVos dodged—she’d review the rule—but definitely didn’t commit to enforcing it. Warren:

I don’t understand about reviewing it. We talked about this in my office. There are already rules in place to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and I don’t understand how you can not be sure about enforcing them. You know, swindlers and crooks are out there doing back flips when they hear an answer like this. If confirmed, you will be the cop on the beat, and if you can’t commit to use the tools that are already available to you in the Department of Education, then I don’t see how you can be the secretary of education.

Betsy DeVos is not here to protect students. That came through loud and clear in her answers to Warren, and millions of people are watching.

Remember how Donald Trump claimed he was going to be a champion of the everyday American and champion workers? Sen. Elizabeth Warren does, even as Trump and his team move quickly to shove those promises into the garbage. In a CNN op-ed, Warren details the ways President Obama has improved life for working people, from raising the minimum wage and requiring paid sick leave for federal contractors to expanding overtime to workplace safety protections, and challenges Trump:

Donald Trump doesn't need to reverse these gains. After all, he won the presidency while arguing that he would stand up for workers and promising millions of "high-paying jobs" for working-class Americans. But now he's pulling a fast reversal. The President-elect has already promised to "cancel immediately," "eliminate" or "repeal" Obama's executive orders and agency regulations. If he follows through on that promise, many of these worker benefits will be obliterated. 

The political campaign is over, and Trump is poised to assume the presidency. When it comes to the economic futures of millions of working families, the stakes could not be higher. Americans will judge the President-elect not by his past promises but by his future actions. [...]

Now it's time for Donald Trump to show his true colors. Will he stand with working people? Or will he toss them overboard and cozy up with corporate CEOs and congressional Republicans who are peddling the same tired old anti-worker plans?

You only have to listen to what Trump’s nominees are saying at their confirmation hearings to know what his choice is. But Democrats like Warren are fiercely determined to keep putting what Trump promised America’s workers next to what he’s delivering. Where they can, they’ll fight Trump on rolling back Obama’s advances, and when workers get hit, Democrats will—Democrats must—make clear what really happened here.

Companies are learning the Trump lesson: Give the man something to brag about, even if it’s not true. And if you give him news he doesn’t like, prepare to be publicly trashed, 140 characters at a time. NBC showed both sides of this simultaneously, drawing a classic angry-Donald response with a report on how companies are pretending that Trump deserves credit for good news planned before the election. 

A spate of companies have recently announced that they’ll be adding jobs or deciding against cutting jobs, with those announcements giving implied or explicit credit to Trump. That way, they get on his good side. But, NBC showed, if you look past the headlines—and Trump’s self-congratulatory tweets—it turns out there’s nothing new here:

GM said its plan was approved before the election, but told Bloomberg it was "accelerated" under pressure from Trump, for example.

Wal-Mart's job creation plans are in line with its normal annual increase, and come after it has closed 269 under-performing stores and cut thousands of jobs.

The combined Bayer-Monsanto U.S. R&D spending pledge is roughly what the two companies are already spending, CNBC reported.

And Sprint's jobs were part of a previously announced commitment by its parent company to create 50,000 jobs in the U.S.

Well, Donald Trump was not just going to sit around listening to that! How dare NBC point out that his precious jobs claims were based on nothing much? Obviously, he could not open his Twitter app fast enough, calling NBC “totally biased” and the story “fake news.” “Came back because of me!” he insisted. (You can just imagine his bottom lip sticking out and his jowls quivering as his little fingers scrabbled across the keyboard putting this important message out.)

Are companies playing Trump, or is Trump playing the public? Either way, the blueprint is clear. Trump will claim credit for a steady stream of jobs that would have been created with or without him, or that are nothing more than normal, incremental growth. And as, over time, the media learns to treat his claims skeptically, Trump will use Twitter (and Breitbart, and Fox) to attack the media for the fake, biased act of looking past what Donald Trump says and reporting the facts. And America’s workers will be left to sort out the difference between what they’re seeing reported and their own economic realities.