Labor Day impends, bringing the sobering juxtaposition of the two Americas.

I refer, of course, to the well-off and often privileged America that will spend the weekend at the lake house, maybe popping the kayak into the water to get a look at the egrets in the marsh grass.

Then there’s the other America, also reasonably well-off and privileged to have been up since 6 a.m. riding Jet-Skis round the same lake. This noisy-fun America thoroughly ticks off the other America that regards non-quiet fun as gauche. But that’s what you get when decades of manufacturing prosperity put Labor Day at the lake in reach of everyone, no matter their tastes.

Of course, they’ll be united, at least around my corner of the Midwest, in fretting about how it’s all on the slide. People will get a few beers in them, say everything’s made overseas these days, and soon be overturning lawn chairs looking for the made-in-China label.

In slightly less slurred form, this is the standard account for oxidation on the Rust Belt. Factories once hired anyone, paying so well that a guy with an eighth-grade education could live like a king. Factories don’t do that any more, goes the narrative, having vanished. So no wonder there’s horrific unemployment i n the inner city. Labor’s day has passed; the ladder’s lost its rungs. This resonates . Take Milwaukee. Once studded with factories, it’s now lined with old, empty buildings along rail lines. Less visibly, though, it’s studded with newer buildings, not far away, where hundreds of thousands of people continue to make things. This involves fewer people, since manufacturing’s seen a quadrupling of productivity in the past half-century. But it still involves many — 3.7 million in the Great Lakes states. The odd thing is how spooked the guys running those factories are about staffing. “People are desperate right now,” one man who runs a business survey for the local commerce association says. He’s not talking about employees. Manufacturers have a work force dominated by baby boomers now starting to retire, and they find they cannot get enough replacements, even for jobs requiring no skills.

“Part of it is even getting people to apply,” the head of the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership, Mike Klonsinski, says. Younger people, even in poor neighborhoods, often seem to shun factory work, he says. “Some people just don’t see themselves being a manufacturing worker.”

Employers are trying. One, desperate for trainees, moved to Milwaukee’s impoverished side and held cookouts on the lawn to attract applicants. Another set up a course with the local tech college, moving people from utterly clueless to $14 an hour as welders in a matter of weeks.

“The soft skills are a surprising challenge,” Mr. Klonsinski says, meaning the ability to communicate with coworkers, to see how a task fits into a process, “even knowing they have to be at work at the start of a shift.”

That’s a big one for Lance Rakow. He’s the general manager of a plant, owned by INX International that dominates its world market for a kind of metal-packaging ink. His production jobs, roughly 20 of them at about $13.50 an hour, do not require experience. They don’t require cars since the plant is readily reached by bus. They don’t even require past good behavior. “I’ve hired plenty of people who have felony convictions,” Mr. Rakow says, including people still on work-release. “The felony conviction does not a bad apple make,” he says.

If only he could get people to show up, or at least call when they don’t. Last autumn and winter, he says, he lost nine guys — one star opted for Bible college, and the rest were fired, mainly because they accumulated too many unexcused, unexplained absences. “It just slaughters you,” he says.

Mr. Rakow says he gets job applicants but few are hireable. He’s not picky: “We’re looking for people whose eyes aren’t glazed over,” he says. Still, given the sheer number of jobless people nearby, he wonders if his hiring troubles signal that unemployment is down to the unemployable. “It seems to me that what’s left is kind of the bottom of the barrel,” he says.

He’s not the only one. Even as agencies helping the poor say there simply aren’t enough jobs, people doing the hiring say they can’t get help. “Some people just want to stay home, or they want to work in a service business, and we don’t know why,” Mr. Klonsinski says.

Schools have to get fixed, all agree. Though when about half of the students in the Milwaukee Public Schools are habitually truant and a third never finish high school, the problem may lie less with the educators than with the voluntarily uneducated.

This talk, then, of two Americas misses a key point: A different schism separates the America that’s doing fairly well from an America that can’t manage to show up for work. Even as urban squalor scandalizes us and leads policymakers to lose faith in free markets, employers grow desperate.

This calls for a different response than the usual conventional wisdom about labor-union law and industrial policy and tariffs. The problem may be less with our economy than with parts of our culture, less with policy and more with attitude.

Lots of stuff might be made in China. Manufacturing’s work force troubles, however, are not.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.