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Robert Bernard Reich ( RYSHE; born June 24, 1946) is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also 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 lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century, and in the same year The Wall Street Journal placed him sixth on its list of Most Influential Business Thinkers. Reich has published multiple books, including the best-sellers The Work of Nations, Reason, Saving Capitalism, Supercapitalism, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, and Beyond Outrage. 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. In 2015, Reich and Kornbluth founded Inequality Media, a nonprofit digital media company. He is also board chair emeritus of 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 (née Dorf) and Edwin Saul Reich (1914–2016), 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 the registration of 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". He attended John Jay High School in Cross River, New York. Reich received a National Merit Scholarship and majored in history at Dartmouth College, graduating with an A.B., summa cum laude, in 1968 and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University College, Oxford. While at Dartmouth, Reich went on a date with Hillary Rodham, the future Hillary Clinton, then an undergraduate at Wellesley College. 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 only 4 feet 11 inches (1.50 m) tall, shorter than the required minimum height of 5 ft 0 in (1.52 m). Reich 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 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, 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. Whereas under 12 years of Republican presidencies the department had largely been used as a patronage posting, Reich envisioned it 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 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, as well as 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, he butted heads 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 goings-on within the White House. During his tenure, he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) 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 (NAFTA), which was negotiated by the George H. W. Bush administration and supported by Clinton following two side agreements negotiated to satisfy labor and environmental groups. Reich served as 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 NAFTA would cause a loss of American employment and 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... [T]he American automobile industry will grow s.... Discover the Adam D Reich popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Adam D Reich books.