Robert Reich

Robert B. Reich (born June 24, 1946) is an American economist, author, and former public official who served as the 22nd United States Secretary of Labor from January 22, 1993, to January 10, 1997, under President Bill Clinton. A professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy until his retirement in 2023, Reich has focused his career on labor economics, workforce development, and critiques of income inequality.

During his tenure as Labor Secretary, Reich enforced the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, providing unpaid leave for family and medical reasons to eligible workers, and led initiatives against sweatshop labor practices in the apparel industry, including public campaigns and regulatory actions. These efforts aimed to protect American workers amid globalization, though Reich later expressed regret over not more aggressively countering rising economic disparities during the Clinton administration.

Reich has authored eighteen books, including The Work of Nations (1991), which analyzed the shift toward a global economy, and later works like Saving Capitalism (2015) and The System (2020), where he argues that concentrated corporate and financial power undermines democracy and calls for expanded government roles in taxation, regulation, and public investment to restore balance. His advocacy for higher taxes on the wealthy and activist government policies has been criticized for underemphasizing incentives, innovation, and empirical evidence of government inefficiencies in addressing inequality.

As a commentator, Reich has influenced public discourse on economic populism, supporting free trade agreements like NAFTA while pushing for worker safeguards, but his broader prescriptions for countering "rigged" systems through state intervention reflect a progressive framework often at odds with free-market analyses of growth and poverty reduction.