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In Glassboro, officials with the nonprofit organization Robins' Nest, Inc., partnered for the second year in a row with representatives from the Gloucester County NAACP and Congressman Donald Norcross to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a day of service benefiting local families and expectant mothers throughout the area.

On Monday, January 21st, volunteers gathered in Glassboro to help put together pregnancy care packages for newborn babies that will be distributed to women in Robins’ Nest maternal health programs, which provide education and supportive services to new and expectant parents throughout southern New Jersey.

Standing near the wall inside of the crowded Teamsters Local 331 hall in Egg Harbor City, Karen Bown, a federal contractor for 18 years, held a sign saying “End this Shutdown” with tears in her eyes.

“Every single day, I don’t know if I will have a job,” said Bown, a contractor working at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Tech Center in Mays Landing. “It has been that way for a month, so I’m very emotional, and I’m very sad that our government has gone this way.”

Today, U.S. Congressman Donald Norcross – a member of the House Education and Labor Committee and an electrician by trade – applauded the agreement by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, Senate President Steve Sweeney and Speaker Craig Coughlin to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour predictably over the next six years and issued the following statement:

“Governor Murphy, Senate President Sweeney and Speaker Coughlin joined me for their first public appearance together calling for $15 an hour minimum wage a little more than a year ago. Today, I’m glad to see they have announced an agreement that will help over a million workers and boost New Jersey’s economy."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) said at an event celebrating the introduction of a bill to more than double the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15.00 per hour said that she and her colleagues do not “begrudge anyone their success or their income” but they do “begrudge exploitation” of workers.

“Do you know that by today, many of the CEOs of the companies that were fighting the minimum wage increase, they have earned as much in the couple of weeks in January as they will pay these employees for the whole year,” said Pelosi. :That is not justice. That isn’t fair. That isn’t right.

U.S. Congressman Donald Norcross of New Jersey's First District recently introduced the "Care Packages for Our Heroes Act of 2019," or H.R. 400, that aims to greatly reduce the costs and spread more cheer among the troops.

All shipping rates for packages that crossed different shipping zones drastically increased January, 2018. While a package going to Michigan from California saw an increase of $0.60, any package sent from Smalltown, USA, to troops stationed in the Middle East had to pay nearly double.