Many celebrated Labor Day just by taking a break from work, but some might recall a time long ago when the "workingmen's holiday" had a little more bite to it.

Union membership in America has declined steeply during the past three decades, and some economists attribute growing economic gaps to the attrition of organized labor. According to the Economic Policy Institute's report, the State of Working America 2008/2009:

"Unionized workers earn higher wages than comparable non-union workers and also are 18.3 percent more likely to have health insurance, 22.5 percent more likely to have pension coverage, and 3.2 percent more likely to have paid leave. The erosion of unionization (from 43.1 percent in 1978 to just 19.2 percent in 2005) can account for 65 percent of the 11.1 percentage-point growth of the blue-collar/white-collar wage gap among men over the 1978-2005 period."

Could making it easier for workers to unionize help take the edge off of their economic woes? Our Monday editorial looked at the Employee Free Choice Act as one initiative that could reduce barriers to unionizing. It would amend the current rules for establishing a union by requiring only that a majority of employees present authorization cards indicating that they want to unionize. The traditional unionizing process, a secret ballot, would still be available as an alternative. The Act would also impose new penalties on employers who try to block organizing efforts.

If the sea of about 84,000 spectators at Invesco Field at Mile High seemed like a lot to you last night, imagine how many arenas we could fill with a much less cheery crowd here in New York. About half a million workers across the state were stuck on the unemployment rolls as of July, according to a new report by the Fiscal Policy Institute.

Calling the joblessness problem “the other crisis in Albany,” the labor-friendly think tank reported yesterday:

The New York State unemployment rate was 5.2 percent in July, up from a low-point of 4.3 percent in 2006. Higher still is the rate of underemployment (8.1 percent in 2007, the latest data available), which includes people who are so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work, and workers who would like to work full time but can only find a part-time job.

The FPI analysis also found that New York workers' median hourly wage has been relatively stagnant since 2003, and dipped over the past year. Modest job growth did occur between 2003 and 2007, according to the report, but was “largely driven by debt and an unprecedented housing market bubble.”

Though Long Island is known as one of the state’s bastions of affluence, it ranked high among counties in terms of rising unemployment. From the first half of 2007 to the first half of 2008, average unemployment in Suffolk grew from about 29,900 to 36,700 (a 22.6 percent jump), and in Nassau from roughly 24,900 to 30,200 (21 percent). New York's overall average unemployment grew by around 13 percent; job losses have clustered in the finance, construction and retail sectors.

The trends signal a troubling change, but not a hopeless one, the institute says. The report urges Albany lawmakers to respond by reforming the state's unemployment insurance system (which currently doles out about $300 per week on average), to help families ride out the economic slump while softening the impact of eroding wages.

Over the past few weeks, about 457,000 people declined an exclusive offer for an expense-paid trip abroad. Nationwide, eight people did sign up for "Operation Scheduled Departure," the Department of Homeland Security's self-deportation pilot program. For others, though, the prospect of voluntarily abandoning their lives in America didn't seem worth the price of flying back on the government's dime.

Immigration authorities had hoped that the friendly approach would entice immigrants with outstanding deportation orders to just ship out, no questions asked.

Reform advocates predicted the initiative's failure, noting the vast numbers of undocumented immigrants who are firmly rooted in the economy and their communities. Groups like the National Immigration Forum say immigration policy should work within that reality, rather than continue to deny it in vain.

Yet the government is bouncing back from its folly by returning to kicking people out the old-fashioned way.

We all know there are two kinds of people in this world ... Mac people and Microsoft people. And for those who didn't know it before, Apple Computer ads--featuring a buttoned-up John Hodgman as a PC and hipster Justin Long as a Mac--hammer the point home. Microsoft is now trying to crash the hipster party by hiring Jerry Seinfeld as a pitchman.

Putting aside the question of whether a 1990s sitcom star will bring the cachet to Microsoft it desires, there's the issue that till now, Seinfeld has been one of the Mac people. His character's apartment always featured the latest-model Apple computer on the desk. As a commenter named Jonathan Wise wrote on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog): "I always look for the Mac on his desk to identify what season of the show I'm watching."

This won't be the first time Seinfeld has appeared in a commercial for a computer company, either. During the 1998 series finale of "Seinfeld," Apple aired a version of its "Think Different" ad that closed with footage of the comedian in younger days.

All's fair in love and war and business. And you have to wonder whether Seinfeld's switch -- which is rumored to come with a $10 million payout -- might be a sign of more switches to come. After all, the economy is sinking while gas, food and utility prices are on the rise. How many other Mac people will be persuaded by their pocket books, and find they can no longer justify paying premium prices for flashy Apple products, when Microsoft's frumpy ones will suffice?

Gov. David Paterson presented the State Legislature with an interesting choice when he laid out $1 billion in proposed spending cuts last week. One of the easier cuts to make -- politically -- is $200 million for legislators' grants to groups and institutions in their districts. The $200 million in pork projects is allocated among Assembly members, state senators and the governor.

Unlike, say, the hospitals and nursing homes that depend on Medicaid, the usually small organizations that receive legislative grants often don't have statewide lobbying arms. That's why they're an easier political target for the budget axe. Cutting growth in Medicaid by $506 million was the single biggest budget reduction Paterson suggested last week, and predictably, the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) and the state's largest health workers union, SEIU 1199, cried foul. They are waging a significant public campaign against the cuts.

Newsday's James Madore is reporting that legislative grants are a focus of talks by Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats. And Liz Benjamin at The Daily Politics blog agrees that there is bipartisan support for pork cutting.

Meanwhile, state leaders continue to work on a compromise to reduce the current budget by $1.2 billion -- or about 1 percent of the $122 billion overall budget -- in time for a special session of the legislature tomorrow. We'll post updates as they happen. Stay tuned.

The state Department of Labor's most recent press release shows an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent in July--a decrease from the previous month, but a marked increase from a year ago. Job losses this year have totalled 20,200. On Long Island, while there was some nonfarm job growth, unemployment rose from 4.7 to 5 percent from June to July.

Still, things could be worse. While unemployment declined slightly in New York from June to July, nationwide, unemployment rose from 5.5 to 5.7 percent over the same period.

Before drawing any conclusions, it's worth parsing how politics might color the data. The New York Times notes that the state's report, which focuses on job losses over the past few months, "accentuated the negative" rather than "trumpeting the decline in joblessness."

Some question whether the state's current economic and fiscal issues are as dismal or as urgent as this report and the Governor's recent call to action in Albany suggest. The Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, wonders if the Governor might be putting a negative spin on the job data to justify fiscal tightening--as he prepares to push budget cut proposals in next week's special legislative session.

You do everything right: You haven’t lost your wallet or checkbook, and you shred sensitive information before tossing it. You cover the keypad at the ATM when you punch in your PIN. You’ve secured your wireless network at home, and you make sure you’re on an “https” Web site before you enter your account number for an online purchase.

And it’s still not enough. As we heard a couple days ago, a vast hacker scheme snared more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers through security holes in the wireless networks of a number of popular retailers.

Personal responsibility only goes so far. Hackers are experts at finding and exploiting weaknesses, leaving everyone else to play catch up. So retailers and the banking industry need to get out ahead. If they want to keep customers, they need to work with technology companies to find better ways to keep our financial data safe.

Depending on your personal perspective, our immigration policy regime -- currently a hodgepodge of federal, state, and local law enforcement measures mixed with populist impulses -- is too lax, unjustifiably harsh or nonexistent. So is it working? Depends on how you define success.

A conservative think tank in Washington has taken a stab at evaluating the current approach to immigration enforcement by trying to measure its impact on illegal immigration. The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for more immigration restrictions, used various government data sources to calculate change in the undocumented population from August 2007 to May 2008. The study found a roughly 11 percent drop, and researchers speculate the trend is tied to increased immigration enforcement.

But the study has attracted criticism from other immigration experts, who say it is skewed by methodological flaws and overgeneralizations about the dynamics of migration and immigrant communities.

Governor David Paterson issued a stern warning on Tuesday and Wednesday, urging lawmakers to tighten their belts and brace for spending cuts. "The era of buy now, pay later and later is over,” he declared.

Figuring out just who pays is, naturally, the tricky part. And in that sense, we can expect the current fiscal tensions to evoke the standard tug-of-war in Albany.

The landscape is already polarizing as the business-oriented Citizens Budget Commission calls for controlling government spending on social services while the labor-friendly Fiscal Policy Institute urges ramping up taxes for higher income brackets.

Despite a diplomatic freeze between the United States and Cuba, a merger in the brewing industry is spilling a frothy trail from Belgium to Missouri to Havana, and possibly the White House.

Budweiser loyalists have protested the pending sale of Anheuser-Busch to Belgium’s InBev, maker of Stella Artois. Though InBev has promised fans of the quintessential American brewery that their product will stay pure, Bud-lovers are understandably a bit stung by the foreign takeover.

The global beer marriage (net weight: 65 billion pints per year) is even raising eyebrows on the campaign trail, due to InBev's links to one of America’s least-favored nations in the Western Hemisphere. The company does business with Cuba, which has for decades been isolated from most U.S. commerce under an economic embargo. Some legal hubbub has emerged over whether InBev’s Cuba ties would interfere with Bud’s heartland-based management operations.

And now, some speculate the power shift in the Bud empire could spill messily into the presidential race.

Squeezed by political and environmental tumult, the oil flows that buoy the country are now sputtering, and the public is paying for it dearly at the pump. “You can’t drill your way out” is becoming a popular cliché in Washington. Yet that hasn't stopped us from trying.

The Washington Post today examines a phenomenon that consumers barely contemplated until the current gas-price crisis hit: oil fields around the world are simply drying up. Geologically, experts worry that demand for oil is fast outstripping supply. Not to mention the political hazards of sucking the stuff out of conflict-ridden lands.

“... many oil experts warn that the world's production will hit a peak soon if it hasn't already. With the exception of Iraq's, most of the ‘easy oil’ in large reservoirs close to the surface is gone.”

What’s happened to all that “supply-side” tax-cut mojo George W. Bush and company used to talk so glowingly about?

Cut taxes and the economy will grow by leaps and bounds, they said. In fact, it will grow so much that the tax cuts will actually pay for themselves, they said.

Well, they cut taxes — a whopping $1.3 trillion worth since 2001 — and the economy hasn’t exactly been unleashed. Not with housing prices swirling the bowl, credit squeezed, jobs being lost, gas prices through the roof, food and milk prices following suit, incomes stagnant and the federal debt mounting astronomically.

In fact, if you count the interest we’ll have to pay on the debt the nation has run up since Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003, the tab is an astounding $3.9 trillion through 2018.

Voodoo comes to mind.

The truth is, tax cuts only affect the economy around the margins. The global economy is just too big and too complex for taxes cut in Washington to have much impact. Ronald Reagan cut taxes (and then raised them, but netted out at an overall reduction) and the economy grew. But Bill Clinton raised taxes and the economy grew even faster for years, before slowing. Bush cut taxes and the economy grew modestly and then tanked — big time.

What’s really important is that Washington collect enough in taxes to cover what it spends on services for the American people. Clinton did. Bush didn’t.

Ed Ott, the executive director of the New York City Labor Council, offered a refreshing view of labor's role during a speech at City University and a subsequent interview with the New York Times' Steven Greenhouse. Ott says that he's happy that unions have helped certain groups achieve middle-class status -- municipal workers, construction workers, telephone workers and teachers. But he believes that labor is abandoning low-wage groups that need unions' help, such as restaurant workers, supermarket cashiers and taxi drivers.

We're bombarded daily with the drama of Wall Street, from the sweat-streaked trading floor to the latest squiggle in the ARM line graph. We can track every flutter of every stock, watch currency being shuffled around the globe, and instantly get real-time analysis of every up and down tick of some index or another.

All this information assailing our television screens and laptop monitors should make us better informed about the economy than ever before, right? So how come so many of us still scratch our heads when confronted with $4-a-gallon gas, pore over tax forms in flummoxed frustration, and can't distinguish between a prime loan and a negative amortization mortgage?

In fact, say some media critics, mainstream news coverage of the economy covers about as much as a fig leaf in the jungle of issues related to our jobs and economic futures.

A study just released by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Beltway think tank, has dissected corporate news coverage of issues like the minimum wage and free trade, to find the voices of ordinary people largely ignored. CAP says that while mainstream outlets routinely cut out workers, labor groups and others at the margins of the economy, they fixate on elite sources--CEOs, big-name market analysts, agency heads and elected officials. Meanwhile, the gap between the media and their audience grows.

Here's how the report slices and dices the print and television coverage of major economic issues:

"Overall, representatives of business were quoted or cited nearly two-and-a-half times as frequently as were workers or their union representatives.

"In coverage of both the minimum wage and trade, the views of businesses were sourced more than one-and-a-half times as frequently as those of workers.

"In coverage about employment, businesses were quoted or cited over six times as frequently as were workers.

"On only one issue that [CAP] examined, credit card debt, was coverage more balanced, presenting the perspectives of ordinary citizens in the same proportion as those of business."

A biofuels boom, an exploding global food crisis. Those two simultaneous, not-so-coincidental phenomena are bursting the euphoric bubble of a major "green" energy sector.

Andy Kimbrell’s commentary on Friday about the food-versus-fuel dilemma raises troubling questions about the consequences of government-backed biofuel development. In recent months, ethanol’s green gloss has dulled in light of new research suggesting that farming our fuel does more harm than good.

To critics of the industry, the issue is fundamentally about displacement: fuel crops replace food crops and pristine land, while political and economic capital gravitate toward market hype at the expense of human needs.

Even if you haven't flown recently, it's hard to miss the news that it's getting more expensive to take to the skies.

Struggling airlines are trying out more new business practices to trim costs, and cutting jobs and adding fees to combat high fuel prices.

The so-called low-cost carriers are hardly immune. So for travelers, the trick is to watch out for the fees. A couple months ago, I searched for the best fare for a July flight for my family and made reservations with Spirit Airlines (which is now flying out of MacArthur). I knew we'd have to pay extra to check our bags, but it was an unpleasant surprise to learn that we will also have to pay fees to reserve seats and even to bring along our children -- toddlers who won't have their own seats but will be sitting in our laps.

In all, the fees added 30 percent more to the cost of the trip. And, of course, that's before we get to the $3 sodas and juices on board. I guess the lesson for fliers is, if there's any conceivable way to assess a fee, most airlines will do it.

Budget accordingly.

The three men in a room in Albany have agreed on legislation to give homeowners more assistance when a lender is about to foreclose. The Albany Times-Union says that the deal includes $25 million for legal services for low-income people, a 90-day pre-foreclosure proceeding and a required settlement conference between the borrower and the lender. We supported some of these measures in an editorial just today.

At the same time, New York's Chief Justice Judith Kaye announced that the courts will create a special division to handle foreclosure cases. The details of her plan are an exact match with what Gov. David Paterson had proposed in his program bill on foreclosures.

Cooperation and progress in Albany. Wow.

If there's anything to like about the woe of $4 a gallon gas it's this: Americans drove 30 billion fewer miles from November 2007 through April 2008.

That's the biggest six-month decline since the last oil crisis in the 1970s. And it was accompanied by a severe drop in the sale of gas-hog SUVs and an uptick in mass transit ridership.

Okay, that's only a one percent decline in total miles driven. But April was the sixth month in a row that miles driven dropped. A billion miles here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real savings -- for our pocketbooks and the planet.

Is it just a blip?

The gas lines of the 1970s also caused motorists to drive less. But as soon as that artificially induced crisis passed, we went right back to unrestrained motoring -- and the auto industry went to pushing out higher and higher horsepower engines and then SUVs.

Motorists should keep doing what they're doing, even if gas sticker shock subsides. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Obama’s Father’s Day speech at a predominantly black church in Chicago raised eyebrows and struck nerves. Yet the message was nothing new in the black community: an exhortation to fathers to fulfill their roles as parents and community members, a warning about the paternal “absenteeism” seen as a scourge by observers both inside and outside black America. But coming from a candidate who has long gingerly toed the racial line—and been lambasted for being both “too black” and “not black enough” by different constituencies—the speech sought to display detached moral firmness and calibrated solidarity.

But while Obama's words about fatherhood frame him as a black American who has risen above common challenges, it also exposes tensions among evolving self-perceptions within black America. Is the problem of absent black fathers more rooted in structural barriers—from economic inequities to bias in the criminal justice system—or does it stem more from a poverty of self-will, to be remedied through individual transformation?

Chronic joblessness, slumping growth and a reeling stock market. If you didn't know any better, that might look a bit like a recession to you. But if White House officials seem determined to keep that word out of the popular lexicon, there's got to be a reason, right?

Whatever you want to call it, the new labor statistics showing 5.5 percent unemployment, accompanied by soaring oil prices, are feeding economic anxieties. And even mainstream economic analysts are starting to murmur the R-word.

President Bush and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao have tried to quell recession fears with another political buzzword. "A surge of new young entrants into the job market," they say, is skewing up the unemployment rate--evoking images of teens mowing lawns and guarding pools, as opposed to middle-aged auto workers.