Michael Reich was born on 18 October 1945 and is a Polish-born economist who primarily focuses on labor economics and political economy.
18 Facts About Michael Reich
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Currently, Reich is a professor of economics and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Michael Reich served as director of IRLE from 2004 to 2015.
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Michael Reich was born in Trzebina, Poland, to Polish-Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust.
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In 1949, his family moved to the United States where Michael Reich attended public schools in New York City, Swarthmore College for his undergraduate degree in 1966, and Harvard University to earn a PhD in economics.
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Michael Reich notes that he was a "child of the Sputnik age", thus he initially attended college with ambitions to become a physicist, focusing primarily in the fields of science and mathematics.
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In 1968, while in graduate school, Michael Reich was a founding member of the Union for Radical Political Economics.
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Michael Reich describes that the group's "radical economic perspective" was molded through the convergence of various movements, including antiwar, civil rights, and student power.
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Michael Reich was a member of the editorial boards of URPE's Review of Radical Political Economics and the Socialist Review.
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Michael Reich contributed at least four articles to The Capitalist System, including a reprinting of "The Economics of Racism".
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Michael Reich was a teacher at Boston University for three years, and then in 1974 became an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Michael Reich serves as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley, and co-chairs IRLE's Center for Wage and Employment Dynamics.
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Michael Reich has served as editor of the publication Industrial Relations, of Berkeley's Institute of Industrial Relations.
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Michael Reich has produced research for the progressive public policy advocacy organization, the Center for American Progress.
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On June 25,2013, Michael Reich testified before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at a hearing discussing the 75th anniversary of the federal minimum wage.
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Michael Reich testified in favor of a minimum wage increase, defending his reports against other contradicting research.
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In July 2017, Seattle Weekly reported it had obtained emails through a public disclosure request showing that Michael Reich had coordinated a June 2017 Seattle minimum wage study with a minimum wage advocacy group, a pro minimum wage public relations firm, and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray's staff.
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The emails show Michael Reich accelerated the timeline of his report to preempt a soon to be released University of Washington study that came to the opposite conclusion.