BridgeWorks
Monday is Labor Day. For most people it is the last long weekend of summer, and there is nothing wrong with spending it that way. But the holiday was created for a specific reason — to recognize the people who do the work, at a moment when the terms of that work were being fought over — and this year the anniversary lands on an interesting week.
The week the numbers looked good
We wrote yesterday about the August jobs report: 162,000 jobs added, unemployment steady at 4.1 percent, and revisions that erased a job loss we had reported in July. By the standard measures, this is a decent labor market.
Standard measures are useful and incomplete. A few things they do not capture, all of which describe people we work with every week:
- The person who stopped looking. The unemployment rate counts people who searched recently. Someone who gave up in month seven leaves the statistic by disappearing from it, which looks identical to finding a job.
- The person working and still short. Wages rose 3.1 percent over the year while prices rose about 3.4. Employment is not the same as sufficiency, and a second job is not visible in the headline rate.
- The person the schedule beat. We have written about the child care and shift-timing mismatch that pushes people out of jobs they were perfectly capable of doing. Nothing in the monthly release records a departure caused by a 6 a.m. start and a center that opens at 7.
- The person with a record, a gap, or the wrong ZIP code who is screened out before anyone reads far enough to find the qualification.
Labor Day, if it means anything beyond a day off, is a good occasion to hold those people in view on a week when the aggregates look fine.
What the day was actually about
The holiday came out of a period when basic questions about work were unsettled — how long a day should be, whether children should be in factories, whether an injury should end a family's income. Those particular fights were won, and it is easy to treat the result as permanent scenery.
The modern versions are less dramatic and not settled. Whether a schedule is posted far enough ahead to arrange care. Whether a job pays enough to live near it. Whether training leads anywhere or just costs money. Whether the trades are open to everyone who could do the work. These are the same category of question, asked in a lower key.
What we are doing about it
We are not a policy organization, and our answer is deliberately narrow: get people credentialed into work that pays, and clear the practical obstacles that stop them. That means apprenticeship pathways into sectors that are still hiring — construction added 22,000 jobs last month, health care 13,000 — and wraparound support for transportation and child care, because those are the things that most often end an otherwise promising placement.
It is unglamorous work and it is the work. A credential that leads to a job with benefits changes a household's trajectory in a way that no amount of encouragement does.
Monday
Take the day. Do the cookout. But the holiday exists because somebody decided that the people doing the work were worth naming, and the honest version of that this year includes the people still trying to get in.
If that is you, the door is more open than it looked a month ago. Our programs start intakes throughout the fall, and Tuesday is a fine day to begin.
