Harold Meyerson

What better way to solve the state's employment problem than spending on critical infrastructure?

So how are California's workers faring on this, the day after their Labor Day weekend?

Abysmally. God-awfully. Consider a few grim particulars:

California ranks third among the 50 states in the percentage of its workers without work. On average, the unemployed Californian is jobless for a record-high eight months, according to a new report from the California Budget Project.

Some key sectors of the California economy have all but vanished. Housing construction, the primary engine of the Southern California and the inland California economy for much of the last decade, leads the list. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of residential construction permits fell by 83%. The number of employed residential construction workers plunged from 487,000 to 77,000. And over just the last two months, the number of home sales has again declined sharply, now that federal stimulus benefits for buyers have trickled to a halt.

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On Labor Day 2010, the state of America's workers is appalling.

Millions have lost their jobs. Millions have had their lives put on hold or thrown into reverse.

Granted, it's a global recession. The state of the world's workers -- at least in the advanced democracies -- should be equivalently appalling. But it's not. The Great Recession has taken a far greater toll on our nation's workers than on workers in similar countries, even those whose economies have dipped more steeply than ours.

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The road to unionized Wal-Mart runs through obscure towns where workers are abused in hidden warehouses.

Nobody, it seems, is responsible for the conditions of work in the warehouses of Fontana -- even though warehouse work is mainly what Fontana has to offer. The Los Angeles exurb is part of California's Inland Empire, which boasts the world's largest concentration of warehouses, to which thousands of trucks make a daily 70-mile trek from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, carrying Asian-made goods for market. Thousands more trucks depart daily from Fontana, carrying those goods, re-sorted and repackaged, to Wal-Marts, Targets, Loews, and Home Depots up to a thousand miles away. Close to 90,000 people work in those warehouses. But no one is responsible for the conditions of their work.

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Populism comes in two varieties -- progressive and reactionary.

Since our founding two decades ago, the Prospect has published many articles on the importance of pocketbook issues in restoring progressivism as this country's governing philosophy. During this period, jobs, earnings, pensions, health coverage, and ladders into the middle class have all become more precarious. Finance has become increasingly

influential on both parties and more dominant in the economy. Economically anxious voters, especially white men, have drifted right. The distress of ordinary people has only worsened with the current crisis.

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Of all the groups in the Democratic orbit, it is labor that has assumed the most demanding role in this year's midterm elections: keeping the white working class from flooding into the Republican column.

"When our canvassers call on our members on their doorsteps, they hear Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly in the background," says Dan Heck, who heads a massive union-sponsored program in Ohio devoted to persuading its members to vote this November for candidates who would mightily displease Beck and O'Reilly.

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Labor's campaign in California has been an ambitious mix of trying to persuade swing voters while at the same time trying to mobilize those Democrats who don't often vote in nonpresidential elections.

Just how blue will California be this November? Will this Democratic state return Barbara Boxer to the Senate and Jerry Brown to the statehouse, or will their mega-funded GOP opponents ride the red tide of what's looking to be a strong Republican year into office?

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