Brown vows no return to strong union past

Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged on Monday to resist calls for greater union rights, saying full employment would be achieved with a flexible workforce rather than by strikes.

Speaking to reporters travelling to the Group of Eight summit, Brown said successful countries in a global economy would be those achieving full employment through "fairness with flexibility".

"So there will be no return to the 1970s, the 1980s, or even early 1990s, when it comes to union rights, no retreat from modernisation," Brown said.

Former prime minister and Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, curbed the bargaining power of trade unions in a reform programme in the 1980s, blamed by left-wingers for throwing thousands out of work.

Brown's Labour Party is due to hold its national policy forum on July 25 and there have been growing calls from the trade unions that help fund the party to make it easier to call strikes.

Brown has insisted on a tight curb on public sector pay awards to stop fuelling inflation. In the year to the end of March the median public sector pay rise was 2.5 percent compared with 3.5 percent in the private sector.

Unions have become increasingly restive after years of relative docility under successive Labour governments since 1997.

Last year more than one million days were lost to strike action, up from an average of 660,000 during the 1990s.

The GMB union earlier this month withdrew funding from the first of 30 local Labour parties in protest at government policies and said it would no longer help pay off the party's 24 million pounds of debts.

Unions now account for close to 90 percent of Labour's donations and are insisting labour law changes including higher redundancy payments and a relaxation of the ban on secondary strike action in industrial disputes.

Rising fuel and food prices pushed Britain's inflation rate to 3.3 percent, well above the central bank's 2 percent target.

Brown has argued that keeping wage growth low is crucial to giving the Bank of England room to cut interest rates as the economy slows.

Several central policymakers have recently highlighted how closely they will be watching wage settlements to see whether higher prices in stores lead to inflation expectations becoming embedded.

Brown said the government would do "nothing that puts employment and future prosperity at risk" adding there was no question of reintroducing secondary picketing rights.