Robert Reich

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Robert Reich stands 4 feet 11 inches tall, and he has spent his working life arguing with people who hold far more power than he does. Born on the 24th of June 1946, he became an American lawyer, professor, author and political commentator. His résumé runs from the Ford administration to a Netflix documentary, with a cabinet seat in between.

  This documentary follows several questions. What did a boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania carry with him into the corridors of Washington? Why did one of his most confident predictions come back to haunt him decades later? Why did a memoir about his government years need to be revised for its paperback edition? And how does a professor end up speaking daily to an audience far bigger than any lecture hall?

  22497

• 2. Bullies and Classmates

  ›

  In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Reich grew up in a Jewish family where his father, Edwin Saul Reich, owned a women's clothing store. His mother was Mildred Freshman, born Dorf. As a teenager he was diagnosed with multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, also known as Fairbank's disease. The genetic disorder affects growth and brings other symptoms, and it made him a target for bullies.

  Older boys became his protectors, and one of them was Michael Schwerner. In 1964 the Ku Klux Klan murdered Schwerner in Mississippi, together with two other civil rights workers, for registering African-American voters. Reich says the killing taught him to "fight the bullies, to protect the powerless, to make sure that the people without a voice have a voice".

  At John Jay High School in Cross River, New York, he won a National Merit Scholarship. He then earned a history degree from Dartmouth College in 1968, graduating summa cum laude. During those years he went on a date with Hillary Rodham, then a student at Wellesley College.

  A Rhodes Scholarship carried him to University College, Oxford, to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. There he first met Bill Clinton, another Rhodes Scholar. The Vietnam War draft reached Reich as well, but he failed the physical examination because of his dysplasia. Oxford granted him an M.A. in 1970.

  At Yale Law School he edited the Yale Law Journal and earned his J.D. His classmates included Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Clarence Thomas, Michael Medved and Richard Blumenthal. At Yale he also studied antitrust law under Robert Bork, which proved useful sooner than anyone might expect.

  From 1973 to 1974 Reich clerked for Frank M. Coffin, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. From 1974 to 1976 he worked as an assistant to Solicitor General Robert Bork. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter named him director of the policy planning staff at the Federal Trade Commission. From 1980 until 1992 he taught at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, writing The Next American Frontier and The Work of Nations. Those Harvard-era ideas soon found their way into Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign platform.

  1620212589

• 3. Secretary of the Work Force

  ›

  On the 21st of January 1993, the Senate confirmed Reich as secretary of labor, unanimously and without controversy, as part of a slate of Clinton appointees. Before that, Clinton had put him in charge of economic policy for the presidential transition. In the opening days of the administration, observers counted him among the most powerful figures in the cabinet. His friendship with the president and his sweeping agenda both contributed to that reputation.

  Reich pictured the Department of Labor as the core of a cluster of agencies, with Commerce and Education working alongside it. Together they would break down old bureaucratic walls. In line with Clinton's platform and his own writing, he called for more federal spending on jobs training and infrastructure.

  He also stretched the job into a roving economic brief. As a member of the National Economic Council, Reich advised Clinton on health care reform, education, welfare reform, national service and technology policy. He weighed in on deficit reduction and spending priorities as well. He pressed independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission to take a labor-focused approach to regulation. He liked to call himself "secretary of the American work force" and "the central banker of the nation's greatest resource".

  Budget director Leon Panetta and Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan stood in his way. Greenspan was a Reagan-era holdover whom Clinton had reappointed. Both ranked among the deficit hawks, and cutting the deficit was the administration's top economic priority, which left Reich's agenda on hold. He later credited Hillary Clinton with keeping him informed about what was happening inside the White House.

  Still, two lasting measures came out of his tenure. He put the Family and Medical Leave Act into practice, and he successfully lobbied for an increase in the national minimum wage. His loudest public assignment that first year, however, had nothing to do with either one.

  2526272838

• 4. The NAFTA Reversal

  ›

  In July 1993, Reich told the public that unions were "just plain wrong" to claim the North American Free Trade Agreement would cost American jobs. The deal had been negotiated under President George H. W. Bush. Clinton backed it after two side agreements were added to satisfy labor and environmental groups. Reich became the administration's leading spokesman, in public and in private, against the organized labor movement that still opposed it.

  He made a specific forecast about cars. Given how quickly the Mexican automobile market was growing, he predicted the United States would gain more auto jobs than it would lose to Mexico. He also argued that trade liberalization after World War II had produced the biggest increase in jobs and living standards among industrialized nations in history.

  In a September 1993 speech to the Center for National Policy, Reich described the opposition as fear. "Great change demands great flexibility," he said, but massive change might invite "a politics of preservation, grounded in fear." He insisted that the resistance had little to do with the agreement itself.

  That October, Reich addressed the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco. Economist Thea Lea of the Economic Policy Institute mocked his outlook as a "field-of-dreams" theory of job creation. His remarks were generally well received, though he mentioned NAFTA only briefly. He spoke instead about the administration's approach to the National Labor Relations Board and to management-labor relations.

  Before the final votes, Reich personally lobbied members of Congress. The House passed the agreement 234-200 on the 17th of November, and the Senate followed 61-38 on the 20th of November. Clinton signed it into law on the 8th of December.

  More than twenty years later, Reich opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as "NAFTA on steroids" and repudiated his earlier position. He said he regretted not doing more to strengthen the side agreements on labor and the environment. He denied, however, that he had backed an expedited fast-track process with no chance for amendment. The anxiety he blamed for the opposition in 1993 soon became the subject of his own speeches.

  3031323336

• 5. The Anxious Class

  ›

  By August 1994, the deficit hawks had largely pushed Reich aside on policy. With White House approval, he delivered the first of four major speeches about a new "anxious class" of Americans. These were people worried about global competition and technological change.

  The Democratic Party's disastrous showing in the November 1994 midterm elections put him back at the center of the economic team. Clinton reorganized his agenda around Reich's proposals. They included middle-class tax cuts, a higher minimum wage, tax deductions for college tuition, federal grants for workers to upgrade their skills, and a ban on strike replacements.

  Soon after the election, Reich told the Democratic Leadership Council that cutting corporate subsidies was the only workable way to pay for jobs training. He called those subsidies "corporate welfare". To the new Republican Congress he conceded that many federal job training programs did not work. He wanted to consolidate the ones that did and end the rest.

  Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown tried to distance the administration from the corporate welfare remarks. Bentsen resigned soon afterward, and Reich kept up his attacks. In February 1995, he met resistance inside the administration over a plan to bar government contractors from permanently replacing striking workers. Clinton sided with Reich, which restored his central role in economic policy.

  That year Reich gave weekly speeches against the new Republican majority. His message was that the country had to adapt to an information-based economy. "We can't get the mass production economy back," he said. On a call-in radio show in Chicago, he told listeners they were on a "downward escalator", battered by corporate downsizing and restructuring.

  In December 1995, he gave a commencement speech at the University of Maryland, College Park. He condemned the way wealthy, educated Americans were separating themselves from everyone else, calling it "the secession of the successful America". The following year, between Clinton's re-election and his second inauguration, Reich decided to leave the department to spend more time with his two teenage sons.

  3738282239

• 6. Locked in the Cabinet

  ›

  By April 1997, Reich had turned his years in the Clinton administration into a book, Locked in the Cabinet. He aimed his criticism at Clinton advisor Dick Morris and at Lane Kirkland, the former head of the AFL-CIO. He also targeted Alan Greenspan, whom he described as "the most powerful man in the world".

  The memoir said the Democratic Party was "owned by" business. It also divided Washington into two real parties during his tenure. One was the "Save the Jobs" party, which wanted to preserve the status quo. The other was the "Let 'Em Drown" party.

  Then critics checked his scenes against the record. They accused Reich of embellishing events with invented dialogue that did not match C-SPAN tapes or official transcripts of meetings. The paperback edition revised or dropped the inventions.

  One example involved the National Association of Manufacturers. In the original telling, members confronted Reich with curses and shouts of "Go back to Harvard!" In the revised version, they merely hissed at him.

  Glenn Thrush later called the book "a classic of the pissed-off-secretary genre". The paperback's foreword offered Reich's own explanation, in a sentence just four words long: "memory is fallible".

  3940412822

• 7. Classroom and Ballot

  ›

  In 1997, Reich became a professor at Brandeis University, teaching undergraduates as well as students at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2003 the undergraduate student body elected him Professor of the Year.

  The next year, he tested politics from the other side of the ballot. In 2002 he ran for governor of Massachusetts and lost the Democratic primary to Shannon O'Brien. He published a campaign book, I'll Be Short. His staff was largely made up of his Brandeis students, and the campaign had little money. Even so, he finished second among six candidates with 25 percent of the vote.

  His platform was ahead of its moment. Reich was the first gubernatorial candidate in the United States to support same-sex marriage. He also backed abortion rights and strongly condemned capital punishment. O'Brien went on to lose the general election to Mitt Romney, the future Republican presidential nominee.

  In early 2005, people speculated that Reich would run again. He instead endorsed Deval Patrick, then little known, who had served as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division under Clinton. Patrick won the party's endorsement and nearly 50 percent in a three-way primary. He won the general election in November 2006.

  On the 1st of January 2006, Reich joined the faculty of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Until he retired in 2023, he taught a popular undergraduate course called Wealth and Poverty, alongside graduate courses. He also sits on the board of trustees of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, which works on extreme poverty and disease in the developing world.

  In 2023, filmmakers Elliot Kirschner and Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse filmed that Wealth and Poverty course and interviewed Reich about his career. The resulting documentary, The Last Class, was released on the 27th of June 2025.

  1948494359

• 8. Public Voice

  ›

  In 1990, Reich co-founded the magazine The American Prospect and became a regular columnist there. He also contributed weekly to the public radio program Marketplace, and he appeared often on CNBC's Kudlow & Company and On the Money. In 2010 the Tribune Content Agency began syndicating his weekly column, and since the summer of 2016 he has written an opinion column for Newsweek.

  Film gave him a second platform. In 2013 he teamed with filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth on Inequality for All, based on his book Aftershock, which won a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Their 2017 documentary Saving Capitalism became a Netflix Original. In it, Reich argues that large corporations began using financial power to buy political influence in the late 1960s. He points to the 2010 Citizens United ruling and urges grassroots mobilization among working-class Americans.

  In 2015, he and Kornbluth founded Inequality Media, which produces his video content. That includes the Resistance Report, a video of fifteen to thirty minutes, and the weekly YouTube show The Common Good. The Simpsons season finale "Poorhouse Rock" in 2022 had him briefly explain the decline of the American middle class during a musical number. Since 2021 he has written a daily Substack newsletter that has attracted more than one million subscribers.

  His positions are consistent but not always comfortable. In a 2008 interview, he said he did not believe in redistribution for its own sake, and he quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. He is pro-union. In 2014 he wrote that he favors a federal minimum wage of 15 dollars an hour, phased in over three years. He also supports an unconditional, universal basic income.

  In July 2020, he opposed a ten-apartment development in his own Berkeley neighborhood, one unit of which would be restricted for a low-income tenant. He backed landmark status for the 120-year-old triplex on the lot, citing "the character of the neighborhood". The Landmarks Preservation Commission denied the designation in August 2020 and again in January 2021.

  He endorsed Barack Obama on the 18th of April 2008, after calling Bill Clinton's primary attacks on Obama "ill-tempered and ill-founded". He supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, and both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020. In 2025 he endorsed Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

  In 1973 Reich married British-born lawyer Clare Dalton in Cambridge, England, and they divorced in 2012. Their sons are Sam, CEO and owner of Dropout, formerly CollegeHumor, and Adam, a sociology professor at Columbia University. Reich later married photographer Perian Flaherty. In 2023, he published a blog post titled "Why I'm So Short".

  He returned to his own history in 2025 with Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. As of the 1st of September 2025, it ranked seventh among non-fiction books on The New York Times Best Seller list. Reviewer Jennifer Szalai noted that bullying is a central subject. She quoted a line from Reich that sums up his instinct: "I would not survive a minute in a society based on brute force."

  5513626397