In July 2013, a manager at a Carls Jr. restaurant in California told an employee to mop the floors using extremely hot water. The worker had to fill her bucket out of a special dispenser that was elevated on a counter and expelled water with a temperature between 180 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. As the worker wrestled with the water bucket on her third day of mop duty, it dropped to the floor, splashing her with scalding water.

The worker ended up having to be hospitalized for her burns. The parent company of the Carls Jr. brand, CKE Restaurant Holdings, was cited for three safety violations as a result, including one investigators considered serious, according to Labor Department records. This June, three years after the incident, the company agreed to pay $23,420 in fines an unusually high penalty following a workplace safety inspection.

If President-elect Donald Trump has his way, Andy Puzder, the chief executive of CKE Restaurant Holdings, will be in charge of fining companies like his own for workplace hazards. Last week, Trump named Puzder to be his labor secretary . If confirmed, he would be the top watchdog responsible for protecting workers from dangerous working conditions and wage theft.

As HuffPost reported Friday, several Hardees and Carls Jr. locations have been investigated and cited by the Labor Department for not paying workers what theyre owed during Puzders time at the helm of CKE. That includes a 2007 investigation that prompted the company to agree to pay nearly $60,000 in unpaid overtime to a group of more than 400 workers a significant case as wage violations go. Many Hardees and Carls Jr. franchisees have also been taken to court for allegedly shorting workers on pay.

CKE and its franchisees apparently have plenty of experience dealing with workplace safety fines as well, according to a review of inspection records with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Since 2000, the year Puzder took over as chief executive of CKE, Hardees and Carls Jr. locations have racked up at least 98 safety violations, 36 of them listed as serious. OSHA defines a serious violation as one that could result in death or grave physical harm that the employer should have been aware of. (Some of those investigations were carried out by federal safety officials, while others, like the one in California, were done through state programs.)

The original fines in those cases totaled $119,975. After talks between officials and employers, the fines were negotiated down to $67,290, likely after managers agreed to address the hazards immediately. Some of the restaurants cited were controlled by CKE itself, while others were run by its franchisees. In all cases, a complaint or injury would have prompted the investigation, since OSHA does not do random inspections of fast-food restaurants.

A spokeswoman for CKE referred all questions related to Puzders nomination to an official with the Republican National Committee, who has not responded to queries from The Huffington Post.