The congresswoman has supported organized labor, but her auto repair shop was listed as ‘NonUnion’ on a federal form that shows five workplace violations in 2017
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D., Wash.) suggested she owned a business in southwestern Washington earlier this year while trying to relate to her constituents’ struggles. But the business the congresswoman co-owns with her husband, Dean’s Car Care, is actually located across state lines in Portland, where the minimum salary requirement is much lower.
In January, Gluesenkamp Perez posted that a “metric shit ton of small business owners in SW Washington (myself included) have wasted precious time” determining whether letters they received about renewing their licenses were scams.
Conflating her business’s location is significant given that Gluesenkamp Perez’s political brand revolves around relating to the financial burdens her working-class and small business-owner constituents face. Yet her shop’s Oregon address allows her to avoid paying her employees Washington’s much higher minimum salary.
As of January 1, Washington law requires employers to pay staff not eligible for overtime the equivalent of $80,172 annually. That’s more than twice the nearly $35,600 that Oregon requires—and will continue to rise through 2028, when it’s expected to hit nearly $94,000.
The Washington Retail Association warned last year that the Evergreen State’s salary requirement, which has more than doubled since 2020, has “jeopardized the ability of nonprofits and main street small businesses to meet their communities’ needs.”
Washington’s tax burdens have also harmed small businesses, with 64 percent saying taxes were their most significant challenge and another 17 percent reporting that they were planning to leave the state, a February survey by the Association of Washington Business found.
Gluesenkamp Perez has raised concerns about businesses leaving rural communities.
“Once you start losing your independent businesses, once you lose the pharmacy, once you lose the auto shop—rural towns can start sort of collapsing,” she said in 2023. That same year, Gluesenkamp Perez lamented that “there are no jobs left in Skamania County,” where she lives, forcing 80 percent of its employed residents to take jobs elsewhere.
Yet her shop has never served her rural constituency or provided jobs in her county. Dean’s Car Care’s principal place of business has been registered in Portland since 2012.
And while Gluesenkamp Perez is a vocal supporter of organized labor and collective bargaining, her business was listed in federal records as a “NonUnion” shop.
She’s also pushed for “safer workplaces,” but the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration slapped Dean’s Car Care with five citations in 2017 for workplace violations, three of which were deemed “serious,” resulting in a $120 fine. The agency found the shop, which had 46 chemicals on site—some containing carcinogens—failed to hold safety meetings, failed to develop a written hazard communication program, failed to train employees on handling hazardous materials, and neglected annual maintenance on fire extinguishers.
Just last month, a chemical implosion at a Washington paper mill killed 11 workers. Gluesenkamp Perez called for a plan to address failures “so we can have safe jobs, come home to our families at night, and rebuild public trust.”
Gluesenkamp Perez has portrayed herself as a hands-on auto shop owner, but an archived version of the business’s website described her as working “mostly behind the scenes,” “making spreadsheets and burning the cookies for our holiday gift boxes.” Her financial disclosure shows she drew a roughly $28,000 salary from the shop in 2024 working as its secretary—a position her husband has also held since February 2023, according to Oregon Secretary of State filings.
The congresswoman was at least six months late on paying the shop’s 2022 property tax bill of nearly $6,600. While delinquent, Gluesenkamp Perez claimed she “paid more in taxes than Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the country.” It was widely reported that Bezos saved $1 billion in taxes when he moved from the Seattle area to Miami soon after.
The congresswoman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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