LABOR DAY: I wrote what follows a year ago, for a blogging effort that didn't happen. It was all true then (except the people's names, which are aliases) and not much has changed since. So... here's my Labor Day story.

LABOR DAY 2002 -- When we moved into a house on West 54th Street in 1980, the guy across the street was a UAW member. Jim didn't work at one of the auto plants, though; he built towmotors at a small factory, just six blocks away on Denison Ave. But he was doing all right, until the towmotor plant closed in the manufacturing implosion of the mid-80s. He never found a real job after that, and finally Jim and his wife retired to Florida (I guess his pension was vested).

Jim's daughter Maryann now lives on West 56th. In the last five years she was among twenty thousand Cleveland women who went from welfare to work -- in her case willingly, via some computer training and an office job with a nonprofit that depends on county and private charity funding. (How'd she end up on welfare? The usual: got pregnant, got married, got pregnant again, husband went to prison, etc., etc.) Of course, after 9/11, the onset of Cleveland's recession, and a county budget crunch, the nonprofit had to lay her off. So now Maryann has gone from welfare to unemployment and has no idea what to do next.

Meanwhile Maryann's oldest child, Mark, graduated from a Cleveland public high school, which is a significant accomplishment in a system where only a third of the ninth graders will see a diploma. He's a big kid, a football player, very articulate and polite.. knows how to use a computer, how to talk on the phone, all those soft skills that job trainers get paid to teach the benighted job seekers. I saw him at the Pick-and-Pay two weeks ago and he told me the sad story: Got a minimum-wage counter job at a gas station. Left after a few weeks for a better-paying, long-term factory job; laid off two weeks later. Tried working as a salesman; didn t make the quota. I gave him the number of the hire locally program at a nonprofit organization of small West Side manufacturers where I used to be on the board. A few days later, I called his mom to let Mark know that the hospital where my wife works has a hiring notice out for porters. The July unemployment rate in Cleveland was 12%. Good luck, Mark.

The towmotor factory where Mark's grandfather had a UAW job just twenty years ago -- a modern, single-story factory building next to a major railroad, handy to highways, with lots of parking and a new electric substation installed by the city around 1990 -- is empty. It was sold to an automotive fastener company which fell on tough times and was bought out by Park-Ohio Industries, which specializes in buying, downsizing and saving small companies. Park-Ohio didn t want to use the building to make fasteners but apparently didn t want to sell it, either (maybe because they'd have to do some toxic cleanup first) so they've left it empty, except for occasional rental to a distribution or trucking business.

A few months ago Park-Ohio asked the City to subsidize a plan to move one of its other subsidiaries into the building -- an industrial bucket maker whose home plant in Cicero, Illinois burned down over a year ago, putting two hundred Spanish-speaking workers on the street. Park-Ohio offered to bring those $8-an-hour jobs (but not the Cicero workers) to its vacant plant in Cleveland, if the City would just kick in tax abatement and a big low-interest loan. But the City is bound by a new Living Wage law which requires companies that get public largesse to pay their workers $9 an hour and respect their union organizing rights. Park-Ohio boss Ed Crawford wasn't willing to make any such promises. So the City's economic developers had to take a reluctant pass on the subsidies, which probably killed the deal.

Too bad. If Park-Ohio had brought its bucket factory from Cicero to Denison Ave., then Maryann and Mark, who aren't looking at any other great prospects, might have applied for jobs there at $8 an hour, right in the same building where Jim was building towmotors for UAW wages when I moved into the neighborhood. And I would have had the perfect metaphor for twenty-two years of recovery in Cleveland.

Happy Labor Day, everybody.