Needed on this Labor Day: more reason to celebrate

The United States has seen better Labor Days.
A brief moved on the wire by the Washington Post late last week captured the essence of the day for many: "This Labor Day weekend will just be another three days without work for more than 9 million Americans. Last week, Goodyear said it was cutting 500 jobs. Sears announced it was laying off 350. Oneida will drop 100 positions from its main plant in New York state and may shutter a factory in Buffalo. RadioShack axed 373 manufacturing jobs. And Chrysler, already down 30,000 jobs since 2001, warned union leaders more layoffs may be coming, as many as 12,000, according to auto industry analysts."
Unemployment nationally is running at 6.2 percent, but that number is made even more troubling by other statistics. The economy, we are told is on the mend, productivity is up ... and yet, jobs are not being created.
Consumer confidence remains flat. And looming ahead are the inevitable effects of a projected $500 billion budget deficit this fiscal year and trillions of dollars in deficits over the next decade. Those deficits will drive up interest rates, discourage domestic investments in plants, equipment and facilities and require the next generation to work harder to pay off this generation's debt.
To be sure, the state of labor is not as dire as it was on that first Labor Day 121 years ago. Men worked six- and seven-day weeks of 10- and 12-hour days. Women worked long hours in the home, taking care of large families on small budgets, with none of the labor-saving appliances or convenience food available today.
On the threshold
Little did our ancestors five or six generations back know that they stood on the threshold of a century that would see the American working man and woman develop into a huge middle class that lived in a state of luxury that the men and women of 1882 could only imagine.
They could not foresee that working Americans would live in their own air-conditioned homes, surrounded by green grass, equipped with dozens of appliances to make life easier and with televisions and computers to entertain and inform them.
On that first Labor Day, sons were expected to follow their fathers into the steel mills or onto assembly lines. White-collar men at large corporations had jobs that were expected to go on forever.
Steelworkers sons -- certainly not their daughters -- did not go to college and break the mold.
All that changed during a century that saw the United States survive two world wars, create an educational system that not only allowed boys and girls to dream of a better life, but to achieve that life. It also saw people become complacent, secure in the belief that things could only get better.
Hard choices ahead
On this Labor Day, perhaps it is time to stop taking progress for granted and to realize that every once in a while a nation must make hard choices and accept temporary sacrifices if it is to continue making progress in the future.
Today, it is the job of Congress and the administration to enter a true dialogue on what can be done to get the economy moving, to get people back to work, to stop the drainage of jobs -- even high-tech jobs -- overseas. Democrats and Republicans must stop talking past each other, stop pursuing their own ideologies and start making difficult choices -- or the 21st century will not hold the same promise for growth and prosperity realized in the 20th.