Thumbs up: To all the hard-working people on this Labor Day weekend, and to those who came before who helped make the American workforce what it is today. In the wake of the Great Recession, some of us are working in lower-paying jobs, others are not working at all. But the American workforce is a driven one, and as a people we work as hard or harder than any other country in the world.

Those of us still lucky enough to keep plugging away also benefit from such conventions as the weekend, a minimum wage, child labor laws, and basic regulations for workplace safety in part because of the struggles of those who came before us.

Thumbs down: To Hurricane Isaac, which later became Tropical Storm Isaac after making landfall Wednesday on the Gulf Coast. The storm has once again proved a powerful reminder that forces of nature still can be great enough to overpower anything people put in their path, flooding neighborhoods and knocking out power in Louisiana and Mississippi, and killing at least five people.