Andrew Puzder has said he doesn't oppose increasing the minimum wage, but that raising it to $15 would lead to job loss and more automation. | Getty Trump chooses Puzder as labor secretary

President-elect Donald J. Trump has officially announced his pick to run the Department of Labor: Andy Puzder.

Puzder is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which included the Carl’s Jr. fast food chain. Trump said Puzder “has created and boosted the careers of thousands of Americans” and is well suited to serve as labor secretary.

“He will save small businesses from the crushing burdens of unnecessary regulations that are stunting job growth and suppressing wages,” Trump said in a statement.

Puzder said he was honored to be nominated and that he and Trump share a belief that the right policies can “result in more jobs and better wages for the American worker.”

Puzder's selection suggests that Trump, despite his strong working-class backing, will favor management over labor at the Labor Department. In 2010 Puzder coauthored a book titled "Job Creation: How It Really Works And Why Government Doesn't Understand It."

Indeed, Puzder has been drawing criticism from unions already. A Nov. 29 story posted on the website of the left-leaning American Prospect quoted Kendall Fells, organizing director for the SEIU-funded Fight for $15, saying, "Puzder as labor secretary is like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Treasury.”

But Puzder has backers within the business community. Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson, a management-side law firm, said, "I think he's a great choice," and predicted Puzder would "do a fabulous job at creating job opportunities for millions of people in this country."

Like Steve Mnuchin, Trump's pick for Treasury, and Wilbur Ross, his nominee for commerce, Puzder is a notably wealthy man. A 2012 SEC filing shows that Puzder made $4,485,055 that year, including base salary and bonuses.

The business sector from which Puzder hails may complicate his new job because food services has lately been the top target for enforcement actions by the Labor Department's Wage and Hour division. Nearly half its low-wage enforcement cases in 2015 — fully 4,787 out of 11,184 — were in the restaurant industry. (Health care placed a distant second, with 1,551 cases.)

Over the previous seven years, about 60 percent of all Labor Department investigations of Carl's Jr. restaurants found violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to data compiled by Bloomberg BNA. Most of these restaurants were owned by Carl's Jr. franchisees rather than CKE.

Puzder's company has been faulted for objectifying women. Advertisements for Carl’s, Jr. have for years featured scantily clad female models eating burgers. In a 2015 interview with Entrepreneur, Puzder shrugged off accusations of sexism, pointing to a rise in sales. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis," he said. "I think it's very American. … I used to hear [that] 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."

Asked in November on Fox Business whether he would want to work in Trump's cabinet, Puzder said. "I think it would be ... the most fun you could have with your clothes on."

If confirmed by the Senate, Puzder could make elimination of the Obama administration's overtime rule his first order of business. The rule doubles (to $47,476) the salary threshold under which virtually all workers get time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a given week.

The overtime regulation would extend overtime eligibility to an estimated 4 million additional workers. The Obama administration's most ambitious intervention in the wage economy, it's drawn high praise from Democrats and fierce criticism from Republicans. But a federal judge in Texas recently delayed the rule's implementation and signaled he will likely throw it out. The Justice Department appealed the decision, but the Trump Justice Department is not thought likely to continue the litigation.

In an op-ed published in May, Puzder described the overtime rule as “another barrier to the middle class rather than a springboard.” He warned that the rule would “cause some employers to reclassify salaried employees as hourly” and that this reclassification “would limit the ability of entry level managers to allocate their time to satisfy the needs of the business and their personal lives.”

For his part, Trump said in August that "rolling back the overtime regulation is just one example of the many regulations that need to be addressed. ... We would love to see a delay or a carve-out of sorts for our small business owners."

Like Trump, Puzder has said he doesn't oppose increasing the minimum wage, but that raising it to $15 would lead to job loss and more automation. Earlier this year Puzder told Business Insider that he was exploring whether to automate Carl’s Jr. restaurants because of rising labor costs from minimum wage hikes at the state and local level. “If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive — this is not rocket science,” he said.

Puzder followed up with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he wrote that minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave laws, and the Affordable Care Act forced restaurants to find ways “to reduce costs while maintaining service and food quality.” He warned that if consumers showed a preference for automated services and if “government-mandated labor-cost increases drive prices too high, the traditional full-service restaurant model … could well become a thing of the past.”

Puzder told the Los Angeles Times in March that CKE’s average wage was more than $10 an hour and that “people don't make minimum wage for a very long period of time.”

Puzder may favor the sort of technical training programs that the Labor Department funds. CKE reportedly offers reimbursements for job training and educational opportunities to full-time corporate employees who have been at the company at least for a year. (The benefits do not apply to the company’s franchisees.)

In testimony before the Senate HELP Committee last year, Puzder said CKE employed 20,000 people, and that its domestic franchisees employed an additional 55,000. In addition, he said that about 62 percent of the company's employees were minorities and 62 percent were women.

As a franchiser, Puzder strongly opposes efforts by the NLRB to hold accountable McDonald's (and, potentially, other fast food corporations) for alleged labor violations committed by company franchisees. Whether McDonald's is a "joint employer" with its franchisees, jointly responsible for franchisees' treatment of fast food workers, is the subject of an ongoing administrative law proceeding against McDonald's in New York. Puzder has criticized the potential joint-employer designation "a lose-lose scenario for everyone — except for the labor unions that have long dreamed of organizing restaurant workers nationwide."

The NLRB is not part of DOL, and operates independently from it.

Alex Isenstadt and Henry C. Jackson contributed to this report.