Sky-high food prices predicted as a New York City truck drivers’ strike spreads across the river into New Jersey.

Holiday weekend death toll reaches 124 on the nation’s highways.

What appear to be contemporary news flashes actually ran on Page One of this newspaper more than 50 years ago, proving that the more things change, the more…

Well, you get the message.

Ever since President Grover Cleveland signed an act in 1894 making the first Monday in September a legal holiday to honor America’s labor force, Labor Day has been a holiday of recurring themes, and an odd mixture of the somber and the frivolous. Even 19th century labor organizer Peter J. McGuire, credited with conceiving Labor Day, admitted the holiday was timed to ??… come at the most pleasant season of the year, nearly midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and would fill a wide gap in the chronology of legal holidays.”

Where once there were parades of union workers, many places like Bangor now have picnics like the one yesterday at Cascade Park. Celebrants not glued to their TV sets watching the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, a worthy event to be sure, or stock car races seem always to enjoy themselves, having a chance to bring their families along and enjoy the food and weather.

The more serious minded in America take stock in how far the labor force has progressed, or regressed, since the last Labor Day. Where just a few years ago there were crippling strikes (United Parcel Service, General Motors, Northwest Airlines and the Communication Workers of America), there now are plant closings, massive layoffs and formerly good jobs being shipped overseas to become bad jobs.

To what end? That depends on which side of the table you’re sitting on, but one fact is beyond dispute. Despite the, until lately at least, robust economy and record unemployment, workers and their families could be doing better. The recent book, “The State of Working America,” published by the Economic Policy Institute, indicates the wage of the median worker and the income of the median family has not met expectations.

“Even groups whose wages grew in the 1980s, such as middle-wage women, white-collar workers, and young college graduates, have faced real wage losses in the 1990s,” notes the book.

If the skittish stock market turns even more bearish by Labor Day 2002, that situation could worsen. Both labor and management might improve the situation by opening the lines of communication and agreeing to a spirit of compromise that would truly make Labor Day the holiday of substance Peter J. McGuire intended it to be.