How do you list items with and without labels from the terminal? Is there a command that can tell the label status (labels as applied in the info menu in the finder cmd+i) of an item from the command-line in OS X? Essentially, I just want to list all the items with or without labels in the current directory, but I can't find any way to pull them appart.

This will help in creating a timed script that runs in the background. Then I can apply a label in finder and expect an action automatically apply to that file without having to make special conditions or keep a curated file with a list.
Using ls, you can show the extended metadata of files:

$ ls -l@
-rw-r--r--@ 1 andrew  staff  1292910 Aug  9 11:36 labelled_file.jpg
    com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_hlsi7t7nerhynemqvydgeb26de       50 


However, the quickest way to get labelled and unlabelled files is with an attribute search using mdfind:

$ mdfind -onlyin . -literal 'kMDItemFSLabel &gt; 0'  # labels have value 50
/cwd/labelled_file.jpg

$ mdfind -onlyin . -literal 'kMDItemFSLabel == 0'
/cwd/all.jpg
/cwd/other.jpg
/cwd/files.jpg