Two years after taking the reins of power, the Bruce Golding administration is coming under increasing pressure for its failure to meet its campaign promise of creating hundreds of new jobs.

The latest Gleaner-commissioned Bill Johnson poll found that seven out of 10 Jamaicans are disappointed with Golding and his team for their failure to create jobs and prevent unemployment.

The Johnson poll, conducted in early August among 1,008 respondents, found that only five per cent of Jamaicans strongly approve of the efforts of the Government on the employment front.

Seventeen per cent of the respondents said they approved giving Golding a positive rating of 22 per cent. This is about 11 percentage points below the average level of support from Jamaica Labour Party voters in the polls.

"I expect that the poll will show that most persons are not satisfied with the Government's handling of the job situation, particularly remembering the JLP's pre-election mantra of 'jobs, jobs, jobs'," Lambert Brown, president of the University and Allied Workers' Union, told The Gleaner.

"It would be consistent with data in the polls you have already released which show unemployment as a major concern and would reflect the job cuts which started even before the economic recession.

"No one is safe, from a manager in a major financial institution to a worker at a small entity, plus the seeming victimisation in some government agencies. People are not seeing any investment or any sign that things will change. There are no green shoots or roots of new investments," Brown added.

The latest data from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security show almost 20,000 people losing their jobs since late last year.

The Government has argued that this is not unusual in the present economic crisis, which has seen millions of people losing their jobs worldwide.

"We are not finding jobs in Jamaica, even to meet a good proportion of recent graduates at both university and high-school level ... . Jobs are very hard to come along," Labour Minister Pearnel Charles recently admitted.

Golding has also admitted that job creation should be a major international priority. He used an address to the International Labour Organisation to back a proposed "global job pact".

"Job creation is not an outcome of economic recovery. It is essential to economic recovery. It is the only sustainable way of stimulating the demand for goods and services without which investments will not take place, factories and businesses cannot be revived and the decline in trade will not be reversed," Golding said.