Working hard or hardly working?

That depends. Which would you rather were true?

On this Labor Day holiday, first observed in 1882 to honor the achievements and plight of the working man and woman, it’s not easy to get a fix on how many Mainers are working second jobs to make ends meet.

Or how many are working more hours unofficially each week, unpaid, because their employers tacitly demand it. Or whether workers are going home at a decent hour each day not because the boss is kind, but because overtime hours have disappeared along with big profits.

Data provided by the Maine Department of Labor show weekly hours in the manufacturing sector averaging about 40 hours in 2001, dipping slightly in 2002-05, then recovering to more than 41 hours for the first half of 2007.

But more telling is the number of workers in the manufacturing sector.

State statistics show 80,000 working in that sector in 1997, dropping to 68,000 by 2002, and, in the most recent accounting, at 60,200 for 2006.

During the same 1997-2006 period, labor statistics show the state’s nonfarm work force at 553,700 in 1997, growing to 603,500 by 2000, then growing more slowly to 614,700 in 2006.

The annual average of weekly work hours of all full-time workers in Maine was 44.2 in 1981, growing to 45.2 hours in 1986, and peaking at 48.6 in 1992. The average workweek has declined since then, and has held steady at 42.9 hours for 2002 to 2005, the last year for which information was available.

Jack McKay, director of the Brewer-based Eastern Maine Labor Council, an affiliation of 34 unions with some 6,000 members, sees the sometimes contrary anecdotal reports about working as reflecting an economy in transition.

“The Wal-Marts, the service sectors,” he said, seem to be hiring two people to work 60 hours a week rather than three people at 40 hours a week. At the same time, service sector employers are holding workers at 30 hours a week to avoid having to pay them benefits, he said.

“There’s been a wholesale shift in the economy,” he said, toward a more fragmented job market.

“I think a lot of people are working second jobs,” he said.

Two or three years ago, McKay heard reports of “crazy overtime numbers” from millworkers in Millinocket and Bucksport, and from those working for Verizon. Union jobs in the manufacturing sector are disappearing, as the state statistics show, he said, with many businesses choosing to use fewer employees working more hours.

“The good-paying jobs are not being replaced,” McKay said.

And, in the professional and semiprofessional job sector, salaries are stagnant, he observed.

McKay believes the role of unions in securing good wages and benefits does not get its due. Nonunion FedEx pays its workers high wages in response to wages secured by union workers at UPS, he argued. And the health and safety of workplaces, the establishment of a minimum wage, and benefits such as pensions can be traced back to the work of unions.

“I think unions are needed more than ever now,” he said, and he believes they play a vital part in keeping a democracy thriving.

The next front on which McKay wants to see unions fight is changing Maine’s “at will” employment laws, which allow a business to fire a worker without explanation, as long as the firing can’t be tied to discrimination outlined in the state’s human rights law.

“There’s a ridiculous disproportion of power in the workplace,” he said. “I don’t care how nice your boss is, if he’s got that power to end your economic life.”

Canada, Italy and France all have laws requiring that firings be tied to just cause, he said.