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The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is demanding for greater  support from the Government as well as the employers to retrenched workers, including the option of a state income insurance scheme.

ACTU has 46 affiliated unions with about 1.8 million members.

The plan, which the Federal Government will consider, includes an insurance scheme where retrenched workers, for a specified  period of time, will get replacement for lost income before they are paid a Newstart allowance.

Sharan Burrow, ACTU president, said that a new income support system was necessary to improve the workers' security.  She said that the $228 a week Newstart allowance is not even one-fifth of the average earnings, definitely lower than the poverty line and that they need additional income to survive, skills improvement training  for better  chances in finding another job.

In the past year, the number of Newstart beneficiaries has soared by 140,000 or 32 per cent to 567,815.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that even before the beginning of the global economic downturn, more than half of Australia's the jobless households were already  living in ''relative poverty'' with the Newstart allowance, one of the most terrible situations for the jobless among the developed countries.

The Federal Government augmented in the budget for May the single age income by $32 weekly, but reasoned that the benefit could not be applied to the unemployed because Newstart was planned as a temporary payment only.

The ACTU proposal for the retrenched income support is not yet final, but one of the alternatives is to make the income protection insurance premiums part of the existing superannuation system.

Aside from ACTU, the welfare groups have expressed concern about the requirement that the unemployed person's savings must not be more than $5500 to be qualified to receive the Newstart allowance.

With the huge difference between average earnings and job loss benefits, debt-burdened individuals and families have been unable to comply with their regular payments.