The following is my Labor Day Column written for a small New England Daily Thetranscript.com. My wife hated it due to its strident class-warfare attitude. I wanted one more rewrite but only had an hour to crank it out before deadline. Had I rewritten it, the piece may have flowed better, but I'd bet that my wife would be talking to me for a couple of days.

It's Labor Day. My coworkers and I have the day off. Granted, it's not because it is a holiday, but rather because the restaurant is always closed on Monday. Worker's Holiday? Don't make me laugh.

The vast majority of working class schlubs in America who do not work for government, large manufacturers or white collar firms will not be celebrating "our" day. We will instead be punching the clock or going about our normal activities.

I would hope the perversity of a low wage worker stocking the shelves at the mall on Labor Day so an investment banker with a weekend house in the Berkshires can find a cheap MP3 player on his long holiday weekend is not lost on the majority of us. Unfortunately I would bet that most folks would not even contemplated the irony.

Perhaps the first time I realized that the modern version of Labor Day was not actually for wage workers was when I was flipping burgers during a high school summer break. I had the audacity to ask if we would, at least, be getting time-and-a-half for working on the first Monday of September. My supervisor's incredulous laugh, at what I thought was a reasonable request, ensured that I did not come back the following June.

Almost 20 years later that incident had faded from my mind. Then I found myself working in the management staff of a very exclusive country club in the Pacific Northwest. It is a place where names like Weyerhaeuser still appear on the membership rolls. The pay and benefits were decent and there was even a standard array of six paid holidays. We still had to work on those holidays, mind you, but an extra day's wages found their way into our checks. Fair enough.

Then one fall, I noticed that the holiday pay I had been expecting had not appeared. That was odd. I pulled out the employee handbook and discovered that the club members who oversaw our benefits had switched Columbus Day with Labor Day as a paid holiday. When I inquired with the sitting Club president, the CEO of a mid-size firm, why the change had occurred, he told me in an adolescently gleeful tone that the board had decided to make an intentional politically incorrect statement about how labor was less important than Christopher Columbus. The members of the board, multi-millionaires all, had thought their actions were oh-so-clever and cute. They also assumed that few of the workers would notice or care. Sadly, they were right.

These anecdotes came to mind last week when I read the news stories about how the past five years of economic expansion have completely bypassed the working class. In our country's modern history there has never been a growing economy for this long that has left the lower rungs of wage earners at, or below, where they were when the last recession hit.

This growing inequality was driven home in last week's Transcript in an article on the cooling of the local housing market. According to realtors the market has softened, that is, except for those in high-end improvement business. As one local business woman put it; "People who have the big bucks are not hurt by what's going on right now. People that have that kind of money are always going to be around."

I see the airlines trying to bust their unions in bankruptcy court. I hear of a major test case in Kentucky where nurses are being reclassified as supervisors to eliminate their organizing rights. And the traditional union job related to manufacturing? Forget about it.

Ford and GM are faltering. Who gets the blame? The workers, of course. Evidently it is not a generations worth of bad business decisions by those with Harvard MBAs. According to people who should know better, it's all the UAW's fault.

And then there are the rest of us; those who cook your food, bus your kids, empty your wastebaskets, bag your groceries, etc… Some of us might have the day off, but when you find those of us who are working today, do your best show a little extra appreciation. Slip your waitress an extra couple bucks or fill out a compliment card at Wal-Mart. But more importantly, ask yourself; "When do these folks get their day?"

Greg Roach is a Berkshires based essayist and working chef. He can be reached at greg@gregoryroach.com.