By John Eckberg
Enquirer staff writer

AT A GLANCE

• 79 percent of workers receive a paid vacation. • 11 percent of workers have access to long-term care insurance. • 7.3 million Americans hold down more than one job. • 10.3 million Americans are self-employed. • 15.8 million Americans are union members. • 77 percent of workers drive alone to their job. Source: U.S. Census Bureau

From its birth at a New York City union parade in September 1882, Labor Day has grown into a national day of reflection about the meaning of work and the future of labor.

And it's no different in the Tristate, a region rocked by a slowdown in manufacturing - though about 881,000 men and women here earn their daily bread with work.

Not everybody spends a lot of time on the holiday - which began in 1894 - reflecting on the deeper meaning of the day. Maybe it's because many are too busy working.

"The hospitality industry never shuts down," said Melissa Johnson, 33, a West Chester resident who works at the Cincinnati Westin Hotel downtown. "It's not a day off for everybody."

In the Tristate, the holiday brings a chance for a last summer picnic and an opportunity to ponder issues faced by workers and companies in an increasingly global and competitive economy: jobs going offshore, shrinking overtime, rising health insurance costs and cuts to benefits.

"We've taken some pretty big lumps in manufacturing," said George Vredeveld, director of the Economics Center for Education and Research at the University of Cincinnati. "Since March 2001, when the recession began, we've lost 2.8 percent of our employment - about 25,000 jobs."

"For manufacturing the downturn started sooner," Vredeveld said. In fact, the region has lost 20,000 manufacturing jobs since May 2000, he said.

Those numbers would sober up any Labor Day beer drinker and bring a nagging sense that doing more with less may be the American workers' mantra for years to come.

"We have young families looking for good paying jobs and four years ago they were promised 5 million new jobs by this administration," said Dan Radford, executive secretary treasurer of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO, an umbrella trade union that represents 100,000 members.

"They are six million jobs behind. We have over nine million families in the past two years that have lost health care. We are seeing teachers, nurses, construction workers, blue-collar and white-collar people losing jobs. In spite of all this, I see a solidarity in the labor movement that I've not seen in many years. People are saying that what is happening must change."

Job satisfaction

In no way is the state of labor in America that bleak, counter experts at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank based in Washington D.C. It crunched recent worker polls and arrived a starkly different conclusion.

Maybe the state of labor is not so bad after all:

• Sixty-four percent of Americans are satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the amount of stress of their job, a 2004 Gallup poll found. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

• Eighty-six percent of Americans are satisfied with the amount of work required for their job, the poll concluded.

• Seventy-nine percent are satisfied with the amount of vacation they receive, while 80 percent do not fear a layoff.

"Overall job satisfaction numbers are very, very positive, though young people are less satisfied and that's no surprise," said Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow who studies public opinion for the institute. "It's their first job or an entry-level job. They are on the lowest rung. Young people tend to be a little less satisfied."

Yet there are other reasons why some look at the labor scene with concern.

Bill Even, professor of economics at Miami University, said that in the last two decades, the disparity between high-wage workers and low-wage workers has grown.

"Particularly in 1980s and mid-1990s, there was a big change in distribution of earnings," Even said.

Skill level matters

"What happened was that people who were less educated, that is, a high school diploma or less, saw their earnings drop in real terms - earnings that didn't keep up with inflation.

"There was a major change in hourly wage gap between the high skill and low skill workers."

Statistics, reports and conclusions mean little to Larry Davis, the African-American owner of Harrison, Davis & Associates. The company, founded in 1992, is a home-based marketing, research, public relations and advertising firm in Monfort Heights.

"The economy is slow. Business is off, but I'm hopeful that things will turn around," Davis said.

For him, Labor Day coincides with end-of-year budgeting and is a time for 2005 revenue projections.

He sometimes wonders why minority-owned firms appear to be the first to feel downturns. Is it because of the owner's ethnicity or because minority companies are usually smaller and therefore more economically vulnerable?

"Talking to other African-Americans in business, whenever the economy is bad, it appears to me that African-Americans and probably other ethnic minorities tend to be hit a little harder," Davis said.

Still, he realizes that these days minority executives are up and down the corporate ladder at company after company in the region, so he wonders if race plays as great a role as in years past.

"Minority-owned firms are smaller," he said. "Smaller contractors always feel it the worse, and they'll get hit harder."

E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com