ST. LOUIS — The stories soon begin to blur:
A machinist laid off when his plant moved the production line to China. A software engineer let go when her company hired programmers in India. A construction-site electrician out of work for three years. A garment worker with nowhere left to turn.
Starting with a rally here this evening, 51 workers from all walks of life -- one from each state and the District of Columbia -- will share their frustrating, frightening and often infuriating experiences of economic dislocation with voters in eight political swing states.
The eight-day "Show Us the Jobs" bus tour, organized by the AFL-CIO, will stop at a food pantry in Minneapolis and a shuttered manufacturing plant in Milwaukee. Participants will flip pancakes with workers who expect to get pink slips from a closing Electrolux plant in Greenville, Mich. They will tour homes sold in foreclosure in Youngstown, Ohio, and commiserate with college graduates unable to find work in Morgantown, W.Va.
At every stop they will press their central theme: The recession might be over, but the pain is not.
"I want people to feel depressed. I want them to know there are so many people out there just like me," said Laura Tropea, 26.
Tropea said she graduated from the Brooklyn College of Law last summer and passed the bar exam in New York. But although she's sending out 20 resumes a week, she has not been able to find work as a lawyer. So she's slicing deli meat part time for $7 an hour -- grateful, she said, to have a job selling food so at least she can count on a few free meals a week.
The tour is targeting states that will be critical in the 2004 presidential election. And every event is designed to spotlight an issue that the AFL-CIO contends President Bush has mishandled, from overtime rules to international trade pacts. The labor organization said the trip was not coordinated with the campaign of Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Seven of the states on the itinerary were decided by fewer than 4 percentage points in the 2000 election. Democrat Al Gore narrowly won Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Bush captured Missouri and Ohio. The final state, West Virginia, went to Bush by 6 percentage points, but analysts expect it to be up for grabs this year.
