Labor Day has come and gone, but it is not to late to remember low-wage workers.

Twenty percent of the work force -- 26 million people -- earn $8.23 an hour or less. Most of them are not teenagers snagging pocket money, but adults supporting families. With so little income, too many Americans are pushed into poverty, and getting out of this trap is increasingly difficult.

As many studies have shown, rising income inequality has driven people apart. And low-wage workers, occupying the bottom rung in this ruptured society, have descended into what amounts to a servant class. It is not their work that makes them servants. We need factory assemblers, store clerks, child care workers and telephone operators, processing much of the nation's commerce.

What makes them servants is the miserable pay. Measuring status by wage, as many Americans do, no one -- the employers of low-wage worker, the public or the low-wage workers themselves -- seems to value this class of work.

[...]

Far from lifting these workers, the unfettered American marketplace holds them down. They need help, ideally from employers, if only those employers could find their way back to the pre-1970s system of long-term employment in low-skilled jobs that included training, promotions and raises. In some places, unions still force this to happen -- at New York City hospitals, for example -- and no hospital is at a disadvantage because each is bound by the same wage scale. But in this era of disappearing unions, that is not likely to work.