WASHINGTON - In a labor version of the Magical Mystery Tour, a priest, creators of anti-offshoring Web sites, students and laid-off factory and technology workers are among the 51 Americans traveling through Rust Belt states this week to talk about their job struggles.

In red, white and blue flag-covered buses, the mood will be less than merry. For Kevin Gregory, 41, of Millinocket, Maine, getting laid off in January 2003 from the Great Northern Paper Mill after 17 years has meant depending regularly on food banks.

"I've had to swallow my pride and get help," said Gregory, who is representing his state on the "Show us the Jobs" tour organized by the AFL-CIO and Working America, an activist affiliate of the labor federation.

Every state and Washington, D.C., will have a representative on the tour, which leaves Wednesday from St. Louis on an eight-day journey through eight states hit hard with job losses.

"I think we need to get the word out there that the economy is not as rosy as people are saying," said Gregory, a union member who earned $21 an hour.

The trip equally is about politics, with stops planned in Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia - battleground states that could determine who wins the White House in November.

The economy is growing, but new jobs aren't being created. In fact, more than 2.2 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001. Organized labor, which is spending millions to get Democrat John Kerry elected, wants to hammer that home to voters. Some tour events, for example, will be held at foreclosed homes and empty factories.

"The real focus is on the fact that America has a jobs crisis," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. "We think that we're on the wrong track when it comes to jobs, and the question is, can we turn it around?"

The tour follows two bus trips by Bush's Cabinet secretaries to promote the administration's economic policies. In February, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Treasury Secretary John Snow embarked on a "Jobs and Growth Tour" to Oregon and Washington - both of which Bush narrowly lost to Al Gore in 2000. Last summer, they traveled to Wisconsin and Minnesota.

"No amount of partisan political rhetoric can contradict the fact that this economy is growing stronger every day," Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank said of labor's bus tour.

New claims for unemployment insurance are at the lowest level since January 2001, and the nation's 5.6 percent jobless rate is below those of economic recoveries in previous decades, he said.

Michigan's tour representative, Laura Tropea, 26, moved home after graduating from law school in New York in June and failing to find a job. She lives with her mother in South Lyon while working at a deli part-time earning $8 an hour, despite passing the Michigan bar exam.

Growing up in a family of auto workers, Tropea said she and her friends were encouraged to go to college and strive for even better-paying, white-collar jobs.

"It's not happening," she said. "It's not happening for us. It's not happening for them. If you can't get skilled trade jobs and you can't get white-collar jobs, where do you turn?"

After seeing friends suffer from unemployment, Dawn Teo, 33, of Mesa, Ariz., launched a Web site last year to educate Americans about the impact of cheap foreign labor here and abroad. A group, Rescue American Jobs, followed.

Teo knows the issue first hand. Her husband, a Chinese-Singaporean immigrant, witnessed and experienced job exploitation by companies in the United States.

"There are millions of people out there who are unemployed and millions more who are underemployed," Teo said.