Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday that his opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), is opting for attacks over substance because “his record is so abysmal.”
Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle asked Moreno, a very successful businessman who built one of the largest auto dealership groups in the United States, about attacks Brown has levied against him regarding a lawsuit over wages at a Massachusetts dealership he used to own.
The lawsuit, from two former employees, came after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in a separate case, unrelated to Moreno, that commissioned salespeople were entitled to overtime, and the ruling was retroactively applied statewide, according to the Republican Senate nominee.
“Sherrod Brown’s never had a job that wasn’t being an elected official. So, of course, he’s going to vilify anybody who had a real job that wasn’t being paid for by the taxpayer with no accountability. So let’s just get that out of the way,” Moreno said.
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He detailed how he built his business from one dealership into fifteen, with thirty brands company-wide.
“We succeeded because I had great people working in my company,” he said. “I knew that my job was to take care of my people, and then the people who worked with me would take care of my clients. And that recipe worked.”
“We were one of the most awarded dealer groups in the country, not just because we sold a lot of cars, but because we took great care of our team members and our clients,” he added. “In fact, the Cleveland Plain Dealer rated my company one of the best places to work in Northeast Ohio multiple years in a row.”
Moreno said that Brown has “latched on to one particular case at a Massachusetts dealership in which the salespeople at a furniture store, nothing to do with me, sued the furniture store saying that commissioned salespeople were entitled to overtime.”
The lawsuit reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which ruled, long after Moreno had sold his dealership, that commissioned salespeople are entitled to retroactive overtime pay, affecting all commissioned businesses in the Bay State.
“The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled a year after I sold my dealership, by the way, they ruled that in Massachusetts, commission salespeople are entitled to overtime, which would have been perfectly fine because, of course, we would have followed whatever law existed at that moment in time,” he detailed.
“But they made the ruling retroactive, so they went backward and said, ‘If you don’t agree with our interpretation of wage law, you owe all this overtime,’” he continued. “Every commission business in Massachusetts was affected whether it’s a furniture store, a car dealership, not just my business,” he added.
Following that Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling, two of Moreno’s former employees brought a lawsuit against him.
“I had probably 60 salespeople during the four years I owned that dealership,” he said. “Two of them that, by the way, were the worst performing salespeople in terms of showing up on time–these were salespeople that made $150,000 to $200,000 a year. If they showed up 35 hours in the week, it was a big deal; in fact, one of them was fired because he didn’t show up to work on time. They sued me.”
“Of course, an uber-liberal Boston jury heard the case for a week and, in seven to ten minutes, decided exactly how much overtime these two salespeople were entitled to,” Moreno continued. “It was in the teens, you know, maybe 12, 13,14, $15,000 over three and a half years, between the two of them; they awarded that. And, of course, in Massachusetts, you’re subjected to crazy penalties and attorney fees, and that’s how it got $400,000.”
Moreno said the process demonstrates the importance of Supreme Court races in states that have them, like Ohio, emphasizing, “If you put radical lunatics in these courts, they’re going destroy this country.”
He added that Brown has to resort to bogus attacks instead of focusing on substance because Brown’s “record is so abysmal.”
“His record is open borders, high prices, instability all over the world, an assault on American energy, and a failure to stand up to China,” Moreno said. “That’s how we’re going to win this race: by focusing on that.”
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