It’s Labor Day today, a day for celebrating the working person. All the papers will be full of features about people with dirty jobs, people with hard jobs, people with odd jobs and, this year, the millions of people without jobs.

I choose today to sing the praises of our garbage collectors. I’m sure garbage collectors everywhere deserve kudos, but I wish to single out specifically the three-person Waste Connections crew that picks up garbage here at The Last Homely House. Every Tuesday and Friday, these heroes go above and beyond the call of duty.

I may never have noticed what great people they were, if it wasn’t for the grandboy. He loves trucks almost as much as he loves bananas – any kind of truck, the bigger the better.

One Tuesday I heard the grunt of the garbage truck’s air brakes down the street, and took Ian to the window to watch as it lumbered by, the guys on the back running this way and that to empty the cans and pick up the bags along the curb.

That was so much fun that on the following Friday when I heard the truck coming, we went out onto the front porch to watch. Now Ian hears the truck when it’s down the street, and runs to grab my hand, screaming, “Truck! Truck!”

We go sit on the porch and as soon as the truck gets to our house, the woman driving it waves and touches the air horn lightly. This sends the grandboy into giggling ecstasies. The guys wave and yell “Hi,” and Ian waves and yells, “Hi.”

Ian’s a good audience. He applauds every time they empty a can into the back of the truck or toss in a bag. Last week one of the guys yelled, “Watch this,” and sent a bag soaring way up in the air, to land neatly right where it was supposed to. Ian was agog with the wonder of it all.

In addition to the show they perform for the grandboy twice a week, let me just mention that I have seen these guys spend long minutes picking up small pieces of trash that overflow from the cans of a neighbor who doesn’t bag, and that even as they streamed sweat during that horrendous heat wave they did their jobs well and waved and greeted us.

These are great people, doing a great job. It’s all the more impressive when you think of how rarely they must be thanked, appreciated or even noticed.

Watching them makes me think of all the people who are without jobs, and wonder. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the greatest number of unemployed are from “sales and office occupations,” with “management, professional, and related occupations” coming in a close second. The fewest unemployed are in “natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations,” and the next-best field for staying employed is “production, transportation and material moving occupations.”

That looks to me as if the people doing the actual work are keeping their jobs a little better than those who answer phones and e-mails, forward papers, and supervise the ones doing the actual work.

To draw anecdotally from a field I’m familiar with: In fat times, major metro newspapers have about 10 editors for every reporter. Maybe more. No kidding. There are copy editors, assignment editors, managing editors, city, state, national and international editors, photo editors, wire editors. Then there’s a whole layer of assistant, deputy and assistant deputy editors, some of whom no one ever sees.

When times get lean, guess who are the first to go? Of course, that isn’t to say that a whole bunch of reporters haven’t gotten the axe – papers everywhere are drawing in their coverage areas, shutting down their bureaus, and exhorting the few remaining reporters to “do more with less” and “work smarter, not harder,” which usually boils down to covering events by telephone and e-mail.

But the newspaper-reading public – what’s left of it – would notice if all the reporters were gone. They don’t generally miss the odd assistant-deputy-managing editor.

I wonder if all the out-of-work supervisors are looking for new supervisor jobs that don’t exist right now because supervisors are a luxury, and employers only have enough money to pay the people who do the real work. I wonder how many out of work managers and supervisors aren’t even considering jobs doing real work, because they have MBAs.

This, and the Waste Connections heroes, remind me of the guy who collected the trash at our house when I was growing up. Our house, then, was outside the Tulsa city limits, and we were still allowed to burn trash in 55-gallon drums. But those drums had to be emptied too, of the cans and things that don’t burn.

The guy who came to do this once a week was a private businessman – people paid him directly, not a company or the city. He had a big truck with a little three-wheel motorcycle on a lift on the back. The motorcycle was fitted with a 55-gallon drum. The motorcycle was necessary because most of the drives where we lived were long and twisty, going around the trees no one had wanted to cut down.

He’d pull to the end of a drive, get the motorcycle off the big truck and zip around to the backs of the houses, emptying the dregs of our 55-gallon drum into the one on his cycle, then zip back and empty his drum into the big truck. It was hard work, and hot, and dirty. He was a nice man who sometimes let kids ride on his three-wheeler.

Him and Mama talked once a month when he came to the house to collect. He usually talked about his son. His son worked with him when he wasn’t in school. Then his son was in college, studying something (I think mathematics) and education, so he could teach. Then his son was out of college and looking for a job. Then his son was teaching but not making enough money to support his new family. Then his son was taking over the trash business, because there was more money in it.

That reminded me of something told me a long time ago at Brazosport College, when I inquired about several degrees one of the deans had in a field other than the one in which he was working. He laughed and said, “You should never let your education limit you.”

There, I think I made a point. I think the point is, if you have an MBA and you’re an out-of-work manager, you don’t have to wait until a managing job comes along – you could join the ranks of the workers you used to supervise. You could build things, or move things, or fix things.