Last Labor Day, the nation was looking at an economic picture of almost unrelieved grimness. If people felt foreboding on that weekend, they had good reason. On Sept. 15, financial giant Lehman Brothers went belly up. It's still the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Two weeks later, it was followed by lender Washington Mutual, our second largest bankruptcy.

This Labor Day weekend promises to be a landmark on our long slog out of a recession that is the deepest and longest since the Great Depression. The economists date its start from December 2007.

It is not being irresponsibly optimistic to say that the recession, in economic terms, ended sometime this summer and that from the vantage point of this Labor Day we can see recovery.

But it is a sad and poignant fact of recoveries, especially on a holiday meant to honor the American worker, that employment is the last economic indicator to revive. Some analysts see the unemployment rate hovering just over 10 percent until next summer. Indeed, figures released in Washington on Friday showed that unemployment had jumped to 9.7 percent in August, the highest it has been since 1983. And that 9.7 percent figure was up a whopping .3 percent from the month before.

It's clear that President Obama's ballyhooed stimulus program has been a money-wasting bust in terms of its effect on the economy and will do nothing but saddle future generations of Americans with even deeper debt.

In addition, a jobless recovery would be disheartening, the psychological impact severe. Americans are hard workers, at or near the top among industrial democracies in the hours they work and how little time off they take. We tend to define ourselves by our jobs, maybe too much.

Since the start of the recession, the economy has shed a net total of 6.7 million jobs. It would be heartless to say, yes, but that's out of a workforce of around 150 million. The success of the American economy has always been its ability to generate jobs. Only a robust recovery will do because in the 10 years 2006 to 2016 the labor force will grow by 12.8 million workers. We will need that many jobs just to stay even, not to mention work for those who lost it in the recession.

When we get back to something like full employment - and we will - it will be a different kind of workforce, older for one. A Pew Research Center study found that the percentage of Americans 55 and older who were working or looking for work rose to 40 percent, the highest since 1961. Many kept working because of the recession but most worked for the satisfaction and the social interaction.

The lesson this Labor Day is, enjoy your work because you're probably going to be doing it a long time. With that cheery thought, happy Labor Day!