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2:14pm UK, Sunday January 04, 2009

A New Year plan to create up to 100,000 jobs for Britain has been unveiled by Gordon Brown.

Brown says his plans will create 100,000 new jobs and kick-start the British economy

The Prime Minister set out an ambitious public works programme to help fight off recession.

“I want to show how we will be able to, through public investments and public works, create probably 100,000 additional jobs… in our capital investment programme,” he told The Observer.

“We are not going to stand by and allow nothing to be done when people are facing difficulties.”

The plan echoes US president Franklin D Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, which helped America recover from the Great Depression.

Mr Brown wants to create jobs in school repairs, new rail links and hospital projects.

He also hopes to usher in a new digital age by creating a super-fast broadband network for Britain, as well as creating several “green jobs”.

His plan to tackle climate change through investments in eco-friendly projects mirrors plans by President-elect Barack Obama in his “Green New Deal”.

This would include investing in electric cars and wind and wave power - which the Prime Minister claims would out-do the Obama plan, creating more jobs for Britain in relative terms.

Mr Brown hopes to create jobs

Sky’s political correspondent Niall Paterson said that although Mr Brown’s aims seem “entirely laudable and entirely achievable”, criticism is likely to follow.

He said: “At the moment, there are around about 1.9 million unemployed in this country. Some estimate that in two years’ time, that could be over three million.

“And when said against that - 100,000 extra jobs really does look like a drop in the ocean.”

But the Prime Minister said he hopes to do more than just create new jobs.

In a bid to preserve existing jobs, he pledged action within weeks to kick-start bank lending to struggling firms.

And he also revealed his own New Year’s resolution - to get fitter by taking up running.

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Report: Layoffs Leading to Data Theft

Workers facing job losses would take company information with them, a new survey finds.

Many employees who face layoffs admit they would take valuable company information with them — if they could get away with it, a new survey found.

In a poll of 226 workers on Wall Street, 58 percent said they would download sensitive corporate data as a pre-emptive move in case of job loss. Forty percent admitted they have already done so, according to Cyber-Ark, a Massachusetts-based IT security firm.

Workers said the information, which could be useful to competing companies, would be used as a negotiating tool to secure their next job.

The data they would take includes customer and contact databases, plans and proposals, product information, and access and password codes, the survey shows.

Sixty-two percent of workers said it was easy to sneak company information out of the office. Nearly half said they would use a memory stick, while others said they would use e-mail, encrypted storage websites, CDs, and even cameras.

Though the trend is increasingly prevalent at larger companies, small-business owners are still vulnerable to data theft, said Adam Bosnian, Cyber-Ark’s vice president of products and strategy.

“Let employees know that you’re going to keep an eye on your sensitive information, even if you don’t put a software solution around that,” Bosnian said. “That’s a very low-cost and very effective way for small businesses to deter theft.”

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