I'm having a lot of trouble installing Perltidy on my home machine, so I haven't been able to test this. However, looking at the docs, it's seems like you want to add -wbb="=", since wbb is "want break before" (there's also wba, "want break after"). Depending on how Perltidy works, this might cause unexpected behavior around tokens like =~, but as I've said, I can't test this. Best of luck.

Hays