Editorial

American workers have plenty of reasons to be proud

Saturday, September 2, 2006

The months most of us think of as summer have come and gone, and with them the traditional time for vacations.

Now it's time to go back to work, but we shouldn't feel alone. That's because there were 151 million of us age 16 and older in the nation's labor force in May 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

That includes 81.2 million men and 69.8 million women, according to government figures. Even in the day of self-service, 100,000 of us are service station attendants, 827,000 are farmers and ranchers, 248,000 of us are pharmacists and 6.8 million are teachers.

About 5 percent of us are hard to put in one category, because we're moonlighters -- some 7.5 million, in fact. That includes 294,000 moonlighters who work at two full-time jobs -- as the Census Bureau wonders, when do they sleep?

Where do people work? Well, for 5.1 million of us, it's for state governments, and for another 2.7 million, it's as civilian employees of the federal government.

For another 10.5 million, it's for ourselves, and 20.4 million women work in educational services, health care and social assistance industries.

Among men, 11.4 million are employed in manufacturing.

And we work hard. Some 28 percent of us 16 or older work more than 40 hours a week, and eight percent work 60 or more hours a week.

Most of us don't stay put long; the median number of years with a current employer is four, and about 10 percent of us have been with our current employer for 20 or more years.

We like to work regular hours, with only 5 percent working the evening shift, between 2 p.m. and midnight and another 3 percent work between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m.

The average New York City resident commutes 38.4 minutes to get to work, but for 5 million of us, the commute time is zero -- we work at home.

Few things are more significant to American society and to individual U.S. citizens than the ability to get and keep a job to provide for ourselves and our families.

Thus, there's good reason to celebrate Labor Day on Monday, a holiday believed to have been first observed with a 10,000-worker parade in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882, organized by Peter J. McGuire, a Carpenters and Joiners Union secretary.

By 1893, more than half the states were celebrating Labor Day on one day or another, and President Grover Cleveland signed a bill in 1894 designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day.