The mission of the federal Department of Labor is both sprawling and clear: “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 work-related benefits and rights.” Though not often in the headlines, the department enforces hundreds of laws and thousands of regulations affecting some ten million businesses and a hundred and twenty-five million American workers, and it has a distinguished history. It celebrated its centennial in 2013. Its headquarters is in the Frances Perkins Building, which is named after its longest-serving secretary.

Frances Perkins was the first female Cabinet member in American history. As the Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, she is widely credited with advancing the abolition of child labor, the establishment of the forty-hour work week, a minimum wage, Social Security, worker’s compensation, and unemployment insurance. She was a powerful advocate for public-works programs. Collier’s, in a 1944 profile, referred to her tenure as “not so much the Roosevelt New Deal, as . . . the Perkins New Deal.” More women (seven) have served as the Secretary of Labor than in any other Cabinet position. Some of the men have also done good work, however. George P. Shultz, who was a Secretary of Labor during Nixon’s first term (and later held other Cabinet positions), helped increase racial diversity in unions.

Donald Trump has chosen a fast-food executive, Andy Puzder, to be his Labor Secretary. Puzder, the C.E.O. of the parent company of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s burger chains, was a heavy donor to the Trump campaign. He is a prominent opponent of raising the minimum wage, of paid sick leave, of efforts to raise the salary threshold for overtime pay, and of Obamacare. Puzder is even critical of the federal relief programs, such as food stamps, that subsidize the poverty wages that he pays his employees. The current federal minimum wage is just $7.25 per hour. The Fight for $15, the most notable labor campaign of recent years, got its start in the fast-food industry, and Puzder, who is passionately anti-union, is among its most determined adversaries. Selecting such a figure to promote the welfare of wage earners is, as Kendall Fells, a Fight for $15 organizer, told The American Prospect, “like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the treasury.”

This has become a pattern among Trump’s appointments—naming bitter foes of federal agencies to head them, or behead them. It’s happening with health, education, environmental protection, civil rights, even at the State Department, according to reports about Trump’s appointment there. But Trump ran for President as the unlikely defender of the forgotten American worker, which makes his nominating a wealthy, anti-labor C.E.O. from an industry notorious for wage theft and labor-law violations to be his Secretary of Labor incongruous, even for him. I tend to agree with John Cassidy’s theory that, as much as the President-elect may enjoy toying with job applicants, his basic notion at this stage is to give Republican congressional leaders the hard-right Administration they crave so that he can pursue his own interests, including private interests, with a minimum of interference from them. The policy and personnel details have already begun to bore him.

This would help explain how he thoughtlessly hired an immigration softie like Puzder. For it seems that, like many large employers, Puzder could see the upside of cheap immigrant labor, and he was on record as favoring immigration reform, along the lines of the bipartisan Gang of Eight’s ill-fated 2013 bill, which was throttled by, chiefly, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama—now Trump’s Attorney General nominee. Puzder has had nice things to say about his company’s Latino workers in California, comparing them favorably to the labor force in the Midwest and Southeast. In 2013, he told the American Enterprise Institute, “They’re very hard-working, dedicated, creative people that really appreciate the fact that they have a job—whereas in other parts of the country, you often get people that are saying, ‘I can’t believe I have to work this job.’ With the immigrant population, you always have the ‘Thank God I have this job’ kind of attitude.”

This was not precisely the tune that Trump sang during his campaign, and some immigration hard-liners went ballistic when he named Puzder. Breitbart News, normally a Trump cheering squad, published furious articles, quoting Puzder’s heresies and linking him to the hated Jeb Bush and Eric Cantor. The Department of Labor is not the lead agency on immigration—the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are more important—but Labor has to certify employer compliance for work visas, and it can aid immigration law enforcement with targeted investigations. An irate column in National Review accused Trump of the rankest treachery, and touted the hashtag #NeverPuzder. Puzder, seeming slightly stunned, hastily issued a ringing statement reversing all of his previous positions. “As Secretary of Labor, I will fiercely defend American workers,” he said. “President-elect Trump’s plan to establish new immigration controls will boost wages and ensure that open jobs are offered to American workers first.”

Trump’s own interest in a great and terrible immigration crackdown and roundup may mercifully wane, along with his interest in other campaign promises made. Or it may not. Certainly, his vetting of Puzder seemed halfhearted. It’s as if Trump were still proceeding instinctively, as at one of his rallies, making semi-impetuous choices. His personal attack, last week, against a local union leader in Indiana who had dared to criticize him was revealing of Trump’s real attitude—deep, ruling-class hostility—toward organized labor. It was also appalling. When will this character begin to understand the power he has accrued, and who some of his followers actually are? The union man was unflappable, at least in public, but he started receiving death threats at home.

With Puzder, it is hard not to think that Trump might simply have recognized a frat brother. Carl’s Jr. is known for outrageous, salacious TV commercials starring young women in bikinis leeringly munching burgers. “He has objectified and undermined women in an effort to sell hamburgers,” Vicki Shabo, of the National Partnership for Women and Families, said. Puzder shrugs off the criticism. "I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it's very American," he told Entrepreneur. "I used to hear, brands take on the personality of the C.E.O. And I rarely thought that was true, but I think this one, in this case, it kind of did take on my personality." Frances Perkins, you have to hope, could not have imagined such a successor. If Puzder is confirmed, he will be free to start dismantling the work of Perkins’s beloved department, perhaps recommending to his boss, as a first move, the elimination of paid sick leave for the employees of federal contractors.