Good Labor Day Monday!
With the holiday today, I’d say it’s time to take a break from Ladders applying to jobs for you or your applying to selected jobs, but our site traffic indicates that many of you have already been taking a break. It’s well-deserved.
This summer, many of us have had a chance to get away from work, away from Zoom, away from the news, and spend meaningful time with our families for the first time in a year.
We can be thankful for all that has gone right for us in the past year. Despite the temporary setback of the Delta variant, we are better prepared, better protected, and better able to handle the challenges of this global pandemic.
A year ago, we had no idea that Operation Warp Speed would deliver a vaccine within months. No way of knowing that the economy would turn around so quickly. No idea that the hiring frenzy would be back soon.
The unemployment rate among the college-educated was 5.3% last Labor Day, which was 0.3% worse than the worst days of the Great Recession. In the latest numbers released on Friday, the unemployment rate had dropped to 2.8% among the college educated. What a terrific result.
That’s a much different place than we were last year, on Memorial Day 2020, when I also wrote on Gratitude.
New York State had experienced 30,000 - 40,000 deaths in the prior two months. (Those of us who were critical of Gov. Cuomo’s response, as I was, have been vindicated - the whole phony, macho front was the character flaw of a deeply distrubed man.) Vaccines seemed years off in the future. Each week, a different country or region would be devastated by the pandemic. And our future was uncertain.
In that newsletter, I mentioned Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi
lyrics:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know
What you've got
Til it’s gone
This Labor Day, let’s give thanks, let’s be grateful for what we’ve got.
You never know when it might be taken away.
What are you ready to show gratitude for this Labor Day? Family, friends; time away, time to play; health, wealth, safety?
Whatever it is, I hope you cherish it dearly this long weekend, and come back to the working world ready to thrive.
Have a great day off, Readers!