BANGOR – From her front porch, Christina Coombs can see the hospital that is just two blocks away from her home.

On Saturday, Coombs stood on that front porch telling John Sweeney, president of the national AFL-CIO, how her family is coping without health insurance and can’t afford to get sick or go to the hospital.

“We recently lost our health care because of a loss of work and a loss of hours,” Coombs said. “Our two children have had surgeries in their lives and hearing issues. They’ve gone through a lot, and we don’t have health insurance.”

Sweeney visited Bangor, Brewer and Bucksport on Saturday to rally union workers to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. More than 50,000 workers are unionized in Maine.

Christina Coombs and her husband, Stanley, a member of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local No. 716, were affected by what she called the “trickledown” effect from the closure of area paper mills.

Hired as a contractor, Stanley Coombs performed metalwork at the mills and now travels out of state for jobs. The family might be eligible for health insurance in January.

Currently the family faces a $1,000-a-month premium if it wants health insurance coverage.

“Everyone wants to plan for retirement and later,” Christina Coombs told Sweeney. “I’m just planning for next week, for day to day. [President Bush] said in his interview [Thursday’s debate] that it’s hard being him. Well, it’s hard being me.”

The union vote is one component of a presidential campaign in which both candidates, Bush and Kerry, have targeted the state’s 2nd Congressional District as a must win.

In the last few years, the state has lost more than 18,000 manufacturing jobs, the majority of them in the 2nd District.

But not every union member is a Kerry supporter, said Linda Fairbuster, a paper-mill worker in Bucksport who is the labor coordinator for PACE Local No. 0-1188 and a Kerry supporter.

“Oh no,” she said. “I’d like to see more people get active. When we had a lot of good jobs and everyone was making money, people got complacent.”

Sweeney said this year’s election is about the Iraq war and fighting terrorism, but it’s also about domestic issues and workers’ rights, whether the workers are in a union or not.

He said workers are facing higher health insurance costs or the elimination of their policies altogether, the threat of their jobs being moved to other countries, insecurity about their retirement benefits, and reductions of overtime pay.

“Sure they’re concerned about national security and terrorism, but they’re also concerned about their own lives,” Sweeney said.

He said the Bush administration is the first one “since the Depression to have less jobs than when they came in.”

“We’re not investing in workers like we should be,” Sweeney said. “Every worker is entitled to expect the American dream, to expect a decent wage.”

The Maine Bush re-election campaign, aware of Sweeney’s visit to the Bangor area, said the national union president is incorrect about Bush’s track record on jobs and workers’ rights.

“President Bush inherited a recession from [President] Bill Clinton,” said Dwayne Bickford, executive director of the Maine Republican Party, on Saturday. “Through the policies the president has enacted, the economy is turning around and jobs are being created. In Maine alone, it was 3,500 jobs last month.”

Bickford said that on the four issues cited by Sweeney – health care, retirement security, overtime pay, and jobs sent overseas – President Bush has implemented policies or has plans to improve those concerns of American workers.

“If we look at these four issues, we have a new economy. It requires new approaches and that’s what the president has been doing since he got in office,” Bickford said.

The AFL-CIO is a federation of 60 national and international unions representing more than 13 million working men and women.