Robert Reich
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and he served as secretary of labor in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the Ten Most Effective Cabinet Members of the century; in the same year The Wall Street Journal placed him sixth on its list of Most Influential Business Thinkers.
Reich has also had a long teaching career. From 1981 to 1992 he was a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and from 1997 to 2005 he was a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. In January 2006 he was appointed Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He taught his last class at Berkeley in the spring of 2023 and is currently Emeritus Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy.
Reich has published numerous books, including the best-sellers The Work of Nations, Reason, Supercapitalism, Aftershock, Beyond Outrage, and Saving Capitalism. The Robert Reich–Jacob Kornbluth film Saving Capitalism debuted on Netflix in November 2017, and their film Inequality for All won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. He is board chair emeritus of the watchdog group Common Cause and blogs at Robertreich.org.
Early life and career
Reich was born to a Jewish family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Mildred Freshman and Edwin Saul Reich, who owned a women's clothing store. As a teenager, he was diagnosed with multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, also known as Fairbank's disease, a genetic disorder that results in short stature and other symptoms. This condition made Reich a target for bullies, and he sought out the protection of older boys; one of them was Michael Schwerner, who was one of the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 for registering African-American voters. Reich cites this event as an inspiration to "fight the bullies, to protect the powerless, to make sure that the people without a voice have a voice".Reich attended John Jay High School in Cross River, New York, where he received a National Merit Scholarship. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in history, summa cum laude. While at Dartmouth, Reich went on a date with Hillary Rodham, then an undergraduate at Wellesley College. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University College, Oxford. While studying at Oxford, Reich first met Bill Clinton, also a Rhodes Scholar. Although Reich was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, he did not pass the physical examination; due to his dysplasia condition, Reich is tall, shorter than the required minimum height of. Reich received his M.A. from the University of Oxford in 1970. He subsequently earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. At Yale, he was a classmate of Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Clarence Thomas, Michael Medved, and Richard Blumenthal.
From 1973 to 1974, Reich served as a law clerk to Judge Frank M. Coffin, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. From 1974 to 1976, he was an assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork, under whom he had studied antitrust law while at Yale. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed him as director of the policy planning staff at the Federal Trade Commission. From 1980 until 1992, Reich taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he wrote a series of books and articles, including The Next American Frontier and The Work of Nations.
Tenure as secretary of labor
Bill Clinton incorporated Reich's thinking into his 1992 campaign platform, and after Clinton won the election, he appointed Reich to head economic policy for the presidential transition.Reich joined the administration as secretary of labor. On January 21, 1993, his nomination was confirmed unanimously and without controversy, along with a slate of Clinton appointees.
In the very early days of the administration, Reich was seen as one of the most powerful members of the Clinton cabinet, both for his friendship with the president and his ambitious agenda for the Department of Labor. Reich envisioned Labor as the nucleus of a cluster of agencies, including the departments of Commerce and Education, which could act in tandem to break down traditional bureaucratic barriers. Consistent with the 1992 Clinton platform and his writings before taking office, Reich called for more federal spending on jobs training and infrastructure.
Reich also took the initiative to expand his flexible power as an economic advisor-at-large to the president. As a member of the National Economic Council, Reich advised Clinton on health care reform, education policy, welfare reform, national service initiatives, and technology policy, in addition to deficit reduction and spending priorities. He also actively engaged independent government agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, to take a labor-focused approach to regulation. He referred to himself as "secretary of the American work force" and "the central banker of the nation's greatest resource".
However, Reich clashed with deficit hawks on the administration's economic team, including budget director Leon Panetta and Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, a holdover from the Reagan administration whom Clinton reappointed. Reducing the deficit was the administration's top economic priority, placing Reich's economic agenda on hold. He later credited Hillary Clinton with keeping him apprised of activities within the White House.
During Reich's tenure, he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act and successfully lobbied to increase the national minimum wage.
NAFTA
Throughout his first year in office, Reich was a leading proponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement ; this agreement was negotiated by the George H. W. Bush administration, and it was supported by Clinton after two side agreements negotiated to satisfy labor and environmental groups. Reich served as the leading public and private spokesman for the Clinton administration against organized labor, who continued to oppose the Agreement as a whole.In July 1993, Reich said that the unions were "just plain wrong" to suggest that NAFTA would cause a loss of American employment; he predicted that "given the pace of growth of the Mexican automobile market over the next 15 years, I would say that more automobile jobs would be created in the United States than would be lost to Mexico... he American automobile industry will grow substantially, and the net effect will be an increase in automobile jobs." He further argued that trade liberalization after World War II had led to the "biggest increase in jobs and standard of living among the industrialized nations history.
In a September 1993 speech to the Center for National Policy think tank, Reich said, "Great change demands great flexibility -- the capacity to adapt quickly and continuously, to change jobs, change directions, gain new skills. But the sad irony is that massive change on the scale we are now facing may be inviting the opposite reaction: a politics of preservation, grounded in fear." Reich specifically said that opposition to NAFTA "has little to do with the agreement and much to do with the pervasive anxieties arising from economic changes that are already affecting Americans." In October, Reich addressed the biannual AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, where economist Thea Lea of the Economic Policy Institute mocked Reich's view as a "field-of-dreams" theory of job creation. His remarks were generally well-received, though only briefly mentioning NAFTA; he focused on the Clinton administration's approach to the National Labor Relations Board and day-to-day business regulation and management-labor relations.
In advance of the final vote, Reich personally lobbied members of Congress to support the Agreement. The bill passed the House by a vote of 234–200 on November 17 and the Senate by a vote of 61–38 on November 20; President Clinton signed it into law on December 8.
Over twenty years later, in opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership as "NAFTA on steroids", Reich repudiated his position. He further admitted that he regretted "not doing more to strengthen 's labor and environmental side-agreements", though he denied supporting an expedited "fast-track" legislative process without opportunity for amendment.
Return to influence (1995–1997)
By August 1994, Reich had largely been sidelined on policy by the deficit hawks in the administration. With the approval of the White House, he delivered the first of four major speeches on the emergence of a new "anxious class" of Americans who were concerned with increased global competition and technological change.After a disastrous performance by the Democratic Party in the midterm elections in November 1994, Reich returned to the forefront of the Clinton economic team. Clinton reframed his agenda around a set of Reich proposals: middle-class tax cuts, a boost in the minimum wage, tax deductions for college tuition, federal grants to help workers upgrade their skills, and a ban on strike replacements.
In a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council shortly after the election, Reich called for cutting corporate subsidies, which he labeled "corporate welfare", as the only viable way to afford jobs training programs. In a concession to the new Republican congress, Reich said that many federal job training programs did not work; he also said that it was necessary to consolidate programs that work and eliminate those that did not. After the speech, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown attempted to distance the administration from Reich's corporate welfare comments. However, Bentsen soon resigned; Reich continued to attack corporate welfare.
In February 1995, Reich met opposition within the administration over his proposal to ban government contractors from permanently replacing striking workers. Clinton sided with Reich, thereby re-establishing his central role in the administration's economic policy.
Reich gave weekly speeches attacking the new Republican majority, with his central message being the need to adapt to an "information-based" economy and the continued need for job re-training. He said, "We can't get the mass production economy back. The challenge now is of a different kind, and many have found it difficult to adapt. This is a major social transformation." During a Chicago call-in radio show, he said, "You are on a downward escalator. You have a lot of job insecurity because of the tidal wave of corporate downsizing and restructuring."
In December 1995, Reich delivered a commencement speech at the University of Maryland, College Park; in this speech, he decried the increasing tendency of wealthy, educated Americans to divide themselves from the general population as "the secession of the successful America".