But on this Labor Day, Patino was behind the counter at a Salt Lake City sandwich shop, working for just over minimum wage with no benefits - not even holiday pay.
She's not alone.
On a day purportedly dedicated to America's laborers, much of the nation's labor force remained out in force. According to Development Dimensions International, a human resource consulting firm, about 40 percent of Americans work on Labor Day. Some work because they want to. But most, like Patino, work because they have to.
At the height of her career as a nursing assistant, Patino made $15 an hour. "That's not great pay," she said, "but I got full benefits - medical, dental, paid vacations and a 401K."
Then, about five years ago, Patino hurt her back while helping to move a patient. For a while, she said, her employer helped pay for her rehabilitation, "but then I was on my own."
And she was on her own in an economy in which American workers - despite significant gains in productivity - are facing shrinking benefits and wages that do not keep up with rising costs.
Since 1979, hourly earning for 80 percent of American workers - those in private-sector, nonsupervisory jobs - have risen by just 1 percent, according to The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, a book by New York Times labor correspondent Steven Greenhouse. At the same time, Greenhouse writes, "worker productivity has increased 60 percent . . . . The nation's economic pie is growing, but corporations by and large have not given their workers a bigger piece."
And it doesn't take a life-changing injury to feel the effects of the sputtering economy. Paris Morgan feels it every day as she waits tables in Park City. "It's slower - fewer people are going out," she said.
And those who do eat out are tipping less, she said. To help make ends meet, Morgan paints murals "and I do other things, you know, whatever I can to pay the bills."
Morgan said she didn't even entertain the idea of being off on Labor Day, which she worked at her normal hourly wage. "In a resort town like this, you work every holiday," she said.
That's the attitude Park City police Officer Wyman Berg brought with him to work on Monday, too. Crime doesn't take a break on holidays, after all.
But although some officers were scheduled to work on Monday, Berg took up an offer to work a Labor Day shift, reasoning the extra pay - at time and a half - would help at a time when just about everything seems to be more expensive.
"We're doing OK, but we've felt the rise in groceries - and especially fuel," said Berg, who, like many of Park City's public employees, commutes 40 miles to work from his home in Salt Lake City, where the cost of living is significantly less.
Executive recruiter Tom Stern, a humorist who writes about balancing work and life for several Internet publications, including The Huffington Post, said that the first conclusion people might draw about workers like Berg, who volunteered to work on a holiday, "is that they're obsessive, that they're socially withdrawn and they can't let go of their job."
But Stern said other pressures are always at play.
"You never know who is out there who has a sick wife, or three kids living with half an income," he said. "There's a lot of fear out there, and a lot of that fear is economically driven."
Labor history expert Mike Sullivan, a retired steelworker and political director for the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers Union in Oregon, said workers have good reason to be afraid right now.
"I was walking around the park Sunday and I saw all these families, Mexican families, mostly, and they were out having picnics and playing soccer," Sullivan said. "Then, today - on Labor Day - I went to the same park and I walked 7 miles and there was nobody there. On Labor Day, working-class Americans all had to work."
Sullivan said new immigrants, in particular, are in the unfortunate position of being easier to exploit. "They're treated as if they have no rights - they're at the bottom of the herd."
And that, he said, hurts all workers.
mlaplante@sltrib.com
