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Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette
Cooper has called for more part-time working
jobs to be available for working parents.
In an interview with the Observer newspaper,
Cooper says that employers should make more
jobs available on a part-time or job-share
basis, and that Jobcentres will be
encouraged to make employers advertise
vacancies in this way. And, according to
the Observer, the government is considering
the prospect of new legislation to extend
the flexible work legislation to apply to
future, as well as present, employers. |
This could allow, for example, a
parent applying for a new job to ask the prospective
employer to alter the hours of the work to fit in
with childcare commitments. Cooper, a
mother-of-three, said more "good quality part-time
jobs" were needed both for lone parents expected to
seek work under the government's planned welfare
reforms and more broadly for many other working
parents. The best employers were
already advertising vacancies as potentially either
full or part-time, she said, and more could be asked
if they would consider alternative ways of filling
supposedly full-time vacancies. "The next stage of
this, for those employers still not thinking about
part-time work or work that fits round school hours,
is actually showing people that it's much easier
than you think. We have already got good examples at
local level of where this is being done."
The aim of these proposals is to provide more work
opportunities for working families, especially at a
time when the government is trying to encourage more
people off benefits and into work.
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