Labor Day news grim, but gloom may lift soon

It's been more than a century since President Grover Cleveland signed the law that made the first Monday in September a federal holiday for working stiffs, but this Labor Day finds Americans in an economic squeeze that leaves little to celebrate.
About 15 million Americans are out of work. Jobs are so scarce that 42 percent of the unemployed have been jobless for more than six months. Even the fortunate 90 percent of Americans who still head to the office every day are finding the work piled on higher, even as their wages stagnate.
Meanwhile, union membership is in retreat as the fiscal woes of state and local governments undermine the public sector employees who are one of organized labor's last bastions.

Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images

A woman waits outside a beauty salon with a "Help Wanted" sign in 

East Los Angeles. A better-than-expected report on employment Friday 

was the latest piece of improving news on the economy. The Labor Department 

said companies added 67,000 jobs in August, more than analysts expected

With so many forces pressing down, it takes an effort of will to see some of the trends pushing the economy back up, especially in the Bay Area, where new and emerging industries like biotechnology, medical devices, green technology and cloud computing are attracting the venture capital and entrepreneurial base for a new prosperity.
But today it's likely that hot dogs will outnumber tri-tips on Bay Area barbecues, as the uncertainty that causes bosses to delay hiring and the fear of a double dip recession also makes consumers save pennies for a rainy day.

Wage slump

Perhaps of greatest interest to the 130 million Americans who are enjoying a day off before they head back to work Tuesday, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute highlights the wage slump that darkens this Labor Day.
The institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, calculates that the average annual private sector wage rose 3.4 percent from 2006 to 2007, before adjusting for inflation. But last year that wage growth was cut in half to 1.6 percent.
Wage growth stalled even as Americans worked harder. The institute says output per hour rose 0.9 percent in 2006, the year before the recession started. Workers cranked out 3.9 percent more goods and services every 60 minutes last year than they did in 2008.
Productivity rose even though many people confessed to wasting time on the Internet in a random survey of full- and part-time workers conducted by StrategyOne, a research-based consulting group.
About 40 percent of respondents told the New York firm that they spent as much as an hour a day doing things like gawking at online videos or keeping up with friends on social networking sites.
Meanwhile, the 9.6 percent of Americans officially counted as unemployed scramble for work in a job market that is creating few new jobs and mainly lower-wage positions at that, according to the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group in New York.
By combining two federal reports - one on employment growth and the other on wages by occupation - the project reckons that three-quarters of the new jobs created so far this year had wages between $8.92 and $15 per hour.

Income plummets

The California Budget Project, a liberal study group in Sacramento, brought the income squeeze down to the state level in its Labor Day analysis.
Using state tax data, the project said that the average adjusted gross income of all California taxpayers - whether filing individually or jointly - fell from $82,268 in 2000 to $68,434 in 2008, after adjusting for inflation.
Even if workers feel the pressure, where can they turn? Long-suffering organized labor saw its membership slip three-tenths of a percent to 12.1 percent of the workforce as of June compared with last year, according to the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
UCLA researchers said that in California, which is more heavily unionized than the nation, membership decreased even more sharply, from 18.3 percent last June to 17.6 percent this year.
The UCLA figures show the divide between public and private sector unionization.
In California, just 9.7 percent of private workers carry union cards (7 percent for the United States) while 56.1 percent of civil servants are represented (36.5 percent nationwide).
Scandals over excessive public employee pensions don't help labor's reputation in the government realm, and undercuts the diminishing moral clout of the smaller private sector union movement.
One local example of organized labor's weakness is the 6-month-old lockout of 61 food service and janitorial workers by the Castlewood Country Club near Pleasanton in a dispute over health benefits.
The club's union workers fumed when Republican challenger David Harmer, who hopes to unseat Democrat Jerry McNerney in California's 11th Congressional District, crossed their picket line to attend an Aug. 5 fundraiser at the club. A Harmer spokesman said the candidate was unaware of the lockout and was not taking sides.

Cause for optimism

Amid a plethora of discouraging news, it's tough to find cause for optimism. But a recent economic summit in San Francisco highlighted the city's strengths, from the growing biotech cluster around UCSF's Mission Bay campus to the phenomenal growth of Web-based software companies such as Salesforce.com, Zynga and Twitter.
Though job gains from these growth sectors have not yet lifted San Francisco's entire workforce, city leaders see the foundations for a stronger economy as the recovery continues.
And while many in the Bay Area continue to experience joblessness and wage stagnation, the region remains better off than most in the state.
That sentiment was reflected in a telephone survey conducted recently by Everest College, a for-profit institution in Los Angeles.
The survey found that more Southern Californians than Northern Californians felt they were working harder (63 versus 43 percent) and were also more fearful of losing some or all benefits (43 versus 29 percent).
National outplacement specialist John Challenger urged job-holders, and especially job-seekers, to remember that it's always darkest just before the dawn.
"Consumers, business owners, hiring managers and even politicians tend to be ... overly pessimistic at the beginning of a recovery," he wrote in his holiday forecast, urging job-seekers to view this Labor Day "as a chance to regroup and renew their resolve."

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