Robert Reich
Public intellectual, Berkeley professor, and former U.S. Labor secretary—prominent critic of union decline, corporate power, and wage stagnation in the globalization era.
Reich’s popular books and commentary emphasize bargaining power, education stratification, and political choices behind inequality—not technology alone. His Labor Department tenure in the 1990s bridged Clinton-era trade openness with workplace-policy concerns.
He offers a labor-side counterpoint to pure consumer-welfare competition narratives without rejecting markets wholesale.
Labor and power
Reich’s emphasis on norms, unions, and corporate strategy supplies a distribution-first counterweight to stories that treat labor markets as frictionless—useful when reading wage, union, and antitrust entries side by side.