BANGOR (AP) – Jobs were the topic of the day in Maine campaigns as U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert addressed a Bangor rally and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney met with idled workers at a former paper mill in neighboring Brewer.

Hastert joined Maine 2nd District congressional candidate Brian Hamel at a breakfast rally, where the Illinois Republican said the Presque Isle businessman has a proven record as a leader and job creator.

“We have to have a person with the perspective and the ability and the ingenuity and the drive to bring jobs and productivity back here,” Hastert said. “I think Brian Hamel can do that.”

Hamel faces Democratic incumbent Rep. Michael Michaud in next week’s election. Hamel is former president of the Loring Development Authority, which redeveloped a former Air Force base into a business center where 1,000 jobs have been created.

Later in the day in Brewer, Sweeney said the only jobs created under the Bush administration are low-wage positions that offer few benefits.

Sweeney said Maine has lost more manufacturing jobs since January 2001 than during the preceding 11 years, while adding less than a tenth of the number of jobs needed just to keep up with population growth.

“More than 10,000 unemployed Maine workers have exhausted their regular state jobless benefits without finding work,” Sweeney said in his prepared remarks.

“The Bush administration has been stubbornly unwilling to admit that their economic policies aren’t working – just as they have been unwilling to admit other mistakes,” said Sweeney.

The labor leader was in Lewiston earlier this month to speak against the Republican administration and for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. On Monday, he spoke at a rally with former employees of Eastern Fine Paper, which closed in January.

A union hall in Skowhegan was on the itinerary Tuesday for Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists, who planned to attend a rally for former union paperworker Michaud and legislative candidates.

Buffenbarger was to visit Skowhegan as part of his “Where are the Jobs?” tour, which is also taking him to the Maine mill towns of Millinocket and Bucksport, shipbuilder Bath Iron Works, Augusta, and Portsmouth, N.H.