Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor and part of the economic transition team advisory board for President Barack Obama, will deliver the Anne Mayhew Distinguished Honors Lecture on September 23 at UT.
His talk—”Inequality for All: Bipartisan Solutions for America’s Economic Future”—will be held at 7:00 p.m. in Cox Auditorium in UT’s Alumni Memorial Building, 1408 Middle Drive. A book signing will follow at 8:00 p.m.
Reich’s visit is hosted by the Office of Honors and Scholars Programs. It is sponsored by the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, College of Business Administration, Friends of the Knox County Public Library, and Office of the Provost.
Now Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Reich served in three presidential administrations. In 2008, Time magazine named Reich one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the past century.
Reich is also a best-selling author, prize-winning professor, media commentator, and playwright. He is considered one of the nation’s leading thinkers about work and the economy.
Reich is the author of fourteen books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into twenty-two languages, and the best sellers Locked in the Cabinet and The Future of Success, which in 2002 was ranked by BusinessWeek magazine as the second best-selling business book. His book Supercapitalism, published in 2007, warned of the perils of an under-regulated and over-leveraged financial system. In his 2010 best seller Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, Reich looks at where the economy is heading after the Great Recession and what to expect over the next decade.
Reich is the co-creator and host of the widely acclaimed 2013 documentary Inequality for All, in which he explains the underlying forces that are shaping our economy and lays out pragmatic solutions for a broader prosperity.
He has a nationally syndicated column and he also writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Financial Times. He is a contributor to CNBC and a frequent panelist on ABC’s This Week and other television programs.
While Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, Reich led the Labor Department on several path-breaking initiatives to build the skills of American workers, crack down on unsafe work sites and fraudulent purveyors of pensions and health insurance, and begin a national initiative to abolish sweatshops. He oversaw the enactment of the Retirement Protection Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the first increase in the minimum wage since 1989.
Reich also served as an assistant to the solicitor general in the Ford administration, where he represented the United States before the Supreme Court, and he headed the policy planning staff of the Federal Trade Commission in the Carter administration.
Reich has been on the faculty at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Brandeis University, and at Brandeis’s Heller Graduate School.
In late 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Prize in Prague for his contributions to world thinking and culture.
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Contacts:
Amy Blakely, (865-974-5034, amy.blakely@utk.edu)