The Washington Democrat’s auto shop also didn’t offer its employees health insurance, former mechanic says
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D.) has said that expanding health care access and driving down costs is a “top priority” as she faces a difficult race to hold her swing seat in Washington’s Third Congressional District. But that apparently doesn’t apply to the Democrat’s staff. Gluesenkamp Perez doesn’t provide health coverage to her campaign staffers, according to financial disclosures reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Nor does she provide health benefits to employees of the auto shop she co-owns with her husband, according to a former mechanic at the shop.
“When I was there we did not have health care,” Colton Stender, who worked full-time at Dean’s Car Care from 2016 to 2019, told the Free Beacon. “I’m pretty damn sure that no one else was.”
It doesn’t appear that policy changed in the ensuing years. A job listing in 2021 for a full-time service writer, which named Gluesenkamp Perez as the contact, didn’t list health insurance as a benefit.
Likewise, Federal Election Commission records show that Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign has paid for some benefits like liability and workers’ compensation insurance, but no direct payments were made for a group health plan. It does employ the human resources platform Gusto, which sometimes manages benefits like health care, but the records don’t show what services the company provided for the campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment. Her 2022 and 2024 campaigns were similar.
Her failure to provide her employees with health care coverage stands in stark contrast to her comments on the campaign trail.
“No one should have to choose between groceries and medicine, or delay care because they’re worried about the next bill,” a Feb. 6 fundraising email said. Another fundraising email Gluesenkamp Perez wrote the next month, which included the subject line, “Expanding health care access,” said she “won’t stop fighting to expand access and lower costs … across Southwest Washington because all of us deserve access to affordable, quality health care.”
Gluesenkamp Perez told the Washington State Standard that bringing down costs, including for health care, “is my top priority.” She’s made similar statements dating back to her first campaign and throughout her time in Congress.
The disconnect between her stated concerns about health care and her refusal to provide coverage for her campaign staff comes as she faces what’s expected to be a difficult bid to hold her swing seat in Washington’s Third Congressional District. It’s also the latest example of Gluesenkamp Perez—whose political brand revolves around relating to the financial burdens her working-class and small business-owner constituents face—making statements that are at odds with her record.
The Democrat has been a vocal supporter of organized labor and collective bargaining, yet Dean’s Car Care was listed in federal records as “NonUnion,” the Free Beacon reported.
Gluesenkamp Perez has also suggested that she owned a business in southwestern Washington, yet her shop is actually located across state lines in Portland. The distinction is crucial, since the Evergreen State’s minimum salary for staff not eligible for overtime is the equivalent of $80,172 annually—more than twice the nearly $35,600 that Oregon requires.
Gluesenkamp Perez has routinely used her auto shop to portray herself as a blue-collar, hands-on worker, running campaign ads and posting stock footage showing her inspecting parts and sliding out from underneath cars. But a deleted portion of her shop’s website said Perez worked “mostly behind the scenes managing the business side of Dean’s” and “enjoys making spreadsheets and burning the cookies for our holiday gift boxes.”
Questions surrounding her image date back to her college years, when she says her father cut her off financially because she stopped going to church, forcing her to pay her own way by juggling multiple jobs, working as a barista, a nanny, and what she called an “iPhone case factory,” but was actually a boutique artisanal workshop that made wooden, hand-crafted cases.
Financial disclosures, however, show Gluesenkamp Perez’s father loaned her between $24,000 and $47,999 to help her buy her first property just two years after she graduated from college, casting doubt on her tale of woe, the Free Beacon reported. She also indicated in 2016 that she owed her father-in-law, her grandmother, and a family friend as much as $47,999, plus up to $23,999 to her grandmother—only her debt to her father remained by the time she filed her next disclosure in 2018. None of her disclosures show any student debt, despite attending Reed College, a prestigious private institution which cost about $46,000 before room and board around the time she attended.
Around the same time she was purportedly struggling to pay her tuition—and going unusual lengths to avoid paying rent, like living in an attic crawl space—Gluesenkamp Perez embarked on a bicycle trip from Portland to Quito, Ecuador, which typically takes three to six months and would have required stepping away from paid work during a time when students often rely on summer earnings to save money.
Gluesenkamp Perez’s self-styled branding in recent years led a former roommate to say the congresswoman is “definitely cosplaying as a poor person.”
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