Ever since President Grover Cleveland signed an act making the first Monday in September a legal holiday to honor America’s workers, Labor Day has been a holiday of conflicting themes, 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 designed to honor work 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.”

It is a gap filled with gusto. Americans, whether watching the Labor Day telethon, a worthy event to be sure, or stock car races or baseball or, better still, enjoying the last real summer weekend out-of-doors with family and friends, seem always to enjoy themselves. Where once there were parades, picnics now rule the day.

Keeping in mind Mr. McGuire’s intent, today also provides the opportunity to assess how far the labor force has progressed, or regressed, since the last Labor Day. The trend clearly is toward regression.

In the mid-’90s, there were crippling strikes, such as at United Parcel Service, General Motors, Northwest Airlines and the Communication Workers of America. The turn of the century brought an acceleration in plant closings, massive layoffs and formerly good jobs being shipped overseas to become bad jobs. This year, the economy expanded without the unemployment falling as outsourcing and offshoring replaced corporate malfeasance and its devastating effect upon investments and pensions, as if the downward spiral afflicting workers inevitably had to draw in retired workers as well.

The once-contentious issue of wage parity, the extent to which hourly pay should keep pace with CEO salaries, now seems quaint – workers no doubt would welcome a return to the days when their biggest complaint was that the boss made 100, or even 150, times more money that they did. And even as the economy grew last year, according to a recent Census report, income stagnated last year and the poverty rate rose. The flat income figure was the fifth in five years, a record the nation would have been better off not setting.

The connection between organized labor and wages generally was made last year in the annual report, “The State of Working America,” by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Sylvia Allegretto of the Economic Policy Institute. They measured the decline of labor from about one-fourth of the working population a generation ago to about one-eighth by 2004.

Their conclusion is worth recalling today: “This falling rate of unionization has lowered wages, not only because some workers no longer receive the higher union wage, but also because there is less pressure on non-union employers to raise wages,” they wrote. The gap in wages and benefits between union nonunion and union then was $30.76 an hour vs. $18.11.

Overcoming stagnant wages will take a lot more than the festivities planned for today, but helping workers to the fruits of their labors has never been a picnic.