A Woodbury, Minn., food shelf will be one stop in an eight-state bus tour that the AFL-CIO is using to highlight the continuing effects of the nation's job crisis.

The tour kicks off Wednesday with a send-off rallyin downtown St. Louis. Stops include Des Moines (March 25), Minneapolis and Rochester, Minn. (March 26), Milwaukee (March 27), Detroit (March 28), Cleveland (March 29) and Pittsburgh (March 30).

Demand is up 14 percent at the Christian Cupboard, which operates every Friday out of Woodbury Lutheran Church, in one of the state's wealthiest communities.

"Even out here, there are a lot of people living on the edge," said Dick Wolff. He and his wife, Sharon, serve as directors of the food shelf. "When we first formed in 1983, people wanted to know if we were going to serve caviar or pheasant under glass," Dick Wolff said.

There actually is a jar of caviar in the refrigerator that someone donated a few weeks ago, Sharon Wolff said, but there are no takers. Instead, people simply seek the basics -- nonperishable items, personal care products, frozen meats and pizzas.

Fewer hours, less pay
The food shelf serves about 65 families a week. Most are workers who are underemployed, the Wolffs said. They are people who can get only part-time jobs instead of full-time work, whose hours have been cut, or who are working for temporary agencies. Some are working full-time, but have been forced into lower-paying jobs that don't come close to matching the salaries or skill levels of jobs they've lost, the Wolffs said.

"A lot of people had good jobs, made a lot of money, then were laid off," Sharon Wolff said. "Suddenly, there they are. They don't have money for food. It can happen to anybody. Even if you have something in reserve, it goes awfully quickly."

Woodbury, despite its sheen, also has its "hidden poor," she said, workers living in subsidized apartments who literally live paycheck to paycheck. "If you're in that realm, if you lose even 2 or 3 days of work, your whole budget is thrown into disarray. You depend on every penny," Sharon Wolff said. "It's hard to support a family on $8 an hour," Dick Wolff added.

A story from every state
The AFL-CIO "Show Us the Jobs" tour will include 51 riders -- one from every state and the District of Columbia -- who will tell their individual stories as a way of demonstrating the effects the nation's "jobless recovery" is having on individuals, families and communities.

The buses are scheduled to stop in Woodbury March 26 at 9 a.m. so riders can help out at the food shelf. They then travel to Rochester, where riders will emphasize the loss of technology jobs, including to outsourcing. Rochester has lost 2,700 information technology jobs, and IT employment in Minnesota as a whole has plunged 30 percent since 2000.

One of the riders is 53-year-old Dan Pechek, of Duluth. Pechek has been out of work more than a year since losing his job of 15 years at the Stora Enzo paper mill.

Pechek is out of unemployment benefits, can't help pay for his daughters' college tuition, and is frustrated at "not knowing what lies ahead."

"Being out of work for this long has completely thrown out retirement plans for myself and my wife -- not to mention the tension that it's place on our marriage."

"The whole experience has truly made me look at big business in general and Bush's Republican administration and see that they're just not doing the right thing for people," Pechek said.

Other workers riding the bus include:

* A Silicon Valley computer quality engineer whose firm sent her to India to train her successors, then fired her the following summer.

* An information technology worker from a western Chicago suburb who survived three rounds of layoffs, but not the fourth. Now he contemplates a career change "because he can't find permanent work in the IT industry," the federation says.

* One of 551 workers Bayer laid off from its Elkhart, Ind., plant last December when the pharmaceutical giant moved production to Mexico and Germany. She now helps dislocated workers.

* A former engineering technician at Boeing's plant in Wichita. He's still got his job "but as a result of" Bush's overtime rules, "he will no longer be eligible for overtime pay."

* A law school graduate from South Lynn, Mich., who can't find work as an attorney--and may go to nursing school.

* A Kansas City, Mo., part-time career counselor at a community college who had to create that post for herself after being laid off from her prior job as a health care consultant.

For more information
Visit the website for the bus tour, www.showusthejobs.com

This article was reported by Union Advocate editor Michael Kuchta and Press Associates, Inc., writer Mark Gruenberg.