page_title: Robert Reich
section_title: Secretary of Labor
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Reich / Secretary of Labor
caption_attribution_description: Rbreich
context_page_description: Robert Bernard Reich is an American economic adviser, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. He was a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.
  Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
  Reich is a political commentator on programs including Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN Tonight, Anderson Cooper's AC360, Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace.
context_section_description: Bill Clinton incorporated Reich's thinking into his 1992 campaign platform, "Putting People First", and after being elected invited Reich to head his economic transition team. Reich later joined the administration as Secretary of Labor. During his tenure, he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), successfully lobbied to increase the minimum wage, lobbied to pass the School-to-Work Jobs Act, and to integrate all job-training and job-displacement programs so workers who lost their jobs could get access to all the help they needed to get new ones that paid at least as much as the old.
  In addition, Reich used the office as a platform for focusing national attention on the need to help American workers to adapt to the new economy. He popularized the term "corporate welfare"—arguing that the nation could get the money it needed to retrain people and move them from welfare to work by cutting "aid for dependent corporations". He advocated that the country provide more opportunities for workers to learn technological skills.
caption: Official Department of Labor portrait of Robert Reich
exif: {}