Robert Reich.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Interview

THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW

Robert Reich was teaching economics and policy at Harvard University s John F. Kennedy School of Government when President Clinton drafted him in 1992 to serve as Labor Secretary. He first met Clinton in 1968, aboard the S.S. United States, when both men were fresh out of college and bound for Oxford to be Rhodes Scholars. Between meeting Clinton and going to work for him, Reich served as an assistant to the solicitor general in the Ford Administration, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court, and worked for President Carter at the Federal Trade Commission. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a professor of economics and policy at Brandeis University.

In his hilarious 1997 book, Locked in the Cabinet, Reich recounts what it was like to be an unabashed liberal in the Clinton Administration. During his time as Labor Secretary, he cracked down on unsafe work sites, launched a national crusade to abolish sweatshops, popularized the term "corporate welfare," and helped push an increase in the minimum wage through a Republican Congress. Despite his distinguished career, Reich never took himself too seriously. At four-feet-ten-inches tall, he was used to being seen as the little guy, and he embraced the role with bottomless good humor. Describing himself sitting in his throne-like official chair in cabinet meetings, he says he looked like a small child, with his feet sticking straight out in front of him. He was also keenly aware that he often sounded shrill to his colleagues when he argued for policies that would benefit working people. As he tells it, he was repeatedly pushed aside by Clinton's more business-friendly advisers, Treasury Secretaries Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin, and the government's eminence grise, Alan Greenspan. No matter what the issue of concern to working people, the business boosters repeated the same deadening mantra: Don't do anything to upset Wall Street.

Still, in his irrepressible way, Reich kept advocating for the progressive values he believes in. He maintains the same energetic optimism today, churning out speeches and op-eds and writing articles on politics and the economy for The American Prospect, the progressive journal he helped found. He has written eight highly acclaimed books, including The Work of Nations, The Power of Public Ideas, The Resurgent Liberal and, most recently, The Future of Success.

Just after Clinton's reelection in 1996, Reich resigned his post as Labor Secretary because, he says, he was spending almost no time with his wife, Clare Dalton, and their two teenage sons, who were soon to depart for college. "I reached a point where I had to leave if I was going to have any life outside work at all," he says.

Overwork is one of the themes of his latest book. In The Future of Success, Reich offers a subtle analysis of how shrinking wages and 24/7 work schedules are driving a huge shift in our society and values. Rather than exhorting people to find balance in their lives, he says we need to move toward a "balanced society." To cushion people against the volatile job market, he proposes earnings insurance and guaranteed jobs. To help alleviate the pressure

on families, he suggests generous parental leave and a guaranteed wage for parents of very young children, as well as flex time, universal, affordable health insurance, public preschool, and an income supplement for anyone working forty hours a week for less than half the median income. He even suggests a $60,000 "nest egg" for every eighteen-year-old.

Reich spoke to me on the phone from his home office in Cambridge about his disappointment with the conservative drift of the Democratic Party, the early days of the Bush Administration, and the revival of progressive politics, about which he remains hopeful.

Q: President Clinton is an opaque character in your book about the Administration. What is he like as a person?

Robert Reich: You know, I'm not sure he's the same person he was. I've known him off and on since we were graduate students together. I never knew him all that well. But the person who became President in 1992 had a lot of fight in him. He wanted to do a lot of things for working people, like health care, like raising the minimum wage. Our agenda was almost too ambitious. But a lot of that fight went out of him after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. He was bewildered by that. Deeply shaken. And his next move was to bring in Dick Morris and engage in infamous quote-unquote triangulation. He moved right. Now he did hold his ground on a couple of important issues. But he signed a welfare bill that I still think history will show to be a wrong decision. And if unemployment goes up, as I suspect it will at some point, many people are going to suffer...