British Prime Minister Gordon Brown unveiled proposals Monday to create 500,000 new jobs for workers, a move aimed at achieving the dream of "a British job for every British worker."
"The prime minister believes we can -- if we make the right decisions -- advance closer to full employment than ever before in our history, so that there is a British Job for every British worker," a Downing Street spokesman said.
During his first speech as the prime minister in June to the Trades Union Congress annual conference in Brighton, south England, Brown said Britain will need five million more skilled jobs in the next decade, and there are 654,000 skilled jobs waiting to be filled in the economy.
The British government is in talks with almost 200 major companies as it attempted to expand partnerships between employers and job centers, he said.
Brown wanted a British job on offer for every British worker, and jobs at the Olympics to go to local young people in London.
He specially hoped that "fast-track" lone parents and the long-term unemployed would come back into work.
The measures that his government will take included: guarantee of an interview for an available job for every lone parent; 400-pound training allowance to help employers train up "fast-track" recruits; extending the days that lone parents can continue to receive benefits after staring work from 15 to 42; back-to-work tax credits worth 40 pounds a week, or 60 pounds in London.
However, trade unions have been warning of a "winter of discontent" over the below-inflation public sector pay offer. Some unions representatives held placards that read "Fair Pay For Public Servants."
Leaders of some of the country's biggest unions have made it clear that coordinated industrial action could be held unless bitter disputes over pay are resolved.
Brown defended his decision to hold down this year's public sector pay rise, saying he does not want a return to "boom and bust" economics.
He warned that if inflation was allowed to get out of control, the country could go back to the "same old familiar pattern" of spiraling prices, high unemployment and public spending cuts that there had been under the Tories.
The government would "always put stability first," he said. "No loss of discipline, no resort to the easy options, no unaffordable promises, no taking risks with inflation," he told union members.
Source: Xinhua
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