Jobs Are the Concern This Labor Day

Labor Day is the day we "take a break" from our labor to honor those who work. The very first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, in New York, a celebration that was created by the Central Labor Union. Two years later, the date was fixed as the first Monday in September.

As we celebrate Labor Day and the traditional end of summer, this year there's a national concern about jobs -- about the number of jobs, the kinds of jobs, the right policies for the creation of jobs. 

It seems that not enough people in America can find the kind of personally or financially rewarding work they seek. The nation's unemployment rate stands at 5.7%. That's far from the breadlines of the Great Depression, or even the double-digit rates of the early 1980s when much of our industrial economy went through an upheaval. (We'll get an update on those unemployment numbers on Friday.)

But the 5.7% unemployment rate in this huge economy represents 8.8 million people who say they are looking for work but can't find a job. That doesn't include the millions who have given up the job search -- an estimated 1.6 million so-called "discouraged workers." 

Nor does it include the "underemployed" -- those working in part-time positions because they can't find full-time jobs or because their hours were cut back. In July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people who worked part time for economic reasons rose by 308,000 to 5.7 million.