Thinking about Labor Day

Add Labor Day to the list of holidays we celebrate without thinking a whole lot about.

Those day-off-from work, no-mail-delivery, no-paying-the-water-bill Mondays that roll around every few months for one reason or another.

It's the day to put away your white handbag, to fire up the grill for one of the season's final cookouts, to hit the stores for super hot buys.

But the "workingman's holiday" also is a time to remember the sweat and toil that goes into abstract numbers like quarterly earnings and gross domestic product.

This year, too, we can't help but think of the faces behind other numbers: 9.7 percent unemployment; 15 million Americans looking for work.

It's worth thinking about our collective work history in a year when too many workers' jobs actually became history.

Iowa unemployment claims were up last month in every county but three. Six percent in Linn County last July versus 4.2 percent the year before. In Johnson County, 4.7 percent, up from 3.3.

Workforce development folks say we should expect to "shed jobs" for a while.

True to a long-running trend, most of the jobs lost have been in manufacturing.

The Iowa Department of Revenue reports that manufacturing hours were down 3.7 percent from a year ago. Nearly 31,000 Iowans have lost jobs in that sector alone since July 2008.

This is just the most recent of several metamorphoses our work landscape has been through since the first Labor Day holiday was celebrated in New York City in 1882.

Thanks, you say. That history lesson and a payroll check will cover next month's rent. It's one thing to talk about the changing work landscape and quite another to navigate it.

And despite the push for green and professional jobs, it's not yet clear what our next work chapter will look like.

Last week at Iowa City's City High School, Bill McTaggart's American Studies students learned about the birth of modern manufacturing by forming their own assembly lines, duplicating a classmate's drawing.

Some got the idea more than others, McTaggart told us parents at a back-to-school night. Some thought it was a lot of fun.

Maybe they'll work on the line when they're older, he said.

We laughed, just as we would have if he'd suggested they might grow up to fill gas lanterns or print duplicate documents by hand.

But if making things is history, what exactly are our little workers of the future to do?