photo: fakelvis on Flickr

The Hackney Citizen reports:

Only one Hackney apprentice on Olympics site: MP Diane Abbott slams low numbers of opportunities for local people

After discovering that only one apprentice working on the Olympics site comes from Hackney, local MP Diane Abbott has called on the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) to address the low numbers of apprentices on the Olympic site as a matter of urgency.

Olympic promise inflation has hit a new high with Gordon Brown’s assertion that, in addition to 30,000 construction jobs, "there will be 50,000 jobs permanently created as a result of all the facilities that the Olympic site will make possible for the future", as reported in the Evening Standard ‘PM hails Olympic Job Prospects’. This claim has to be set against the original evidence from the London Development Agency to the Compulsory Purchase Inquiry that the 2012 Olympics would create 6,000 net new permanent jobs! Even that figure was open to question.

BBC London has discovered that hundreds of eastern European workers have been duped by a scam promising non-existent jobs at the Olympic site in east London. Our investigations unit and reporter Katharine Carpenter tracked down a convicted fraudster from east London who ran a scheme promising Slovak workers accommodation on a cruise ship in Docklands and jobs on the site.

London Olympic chiefs defended the salaries of its top executives on Thursday after it emerged some were earning up to 100,000 pounds more than first thought.About seven senior executives at the Olympic Delivery Authority are being paid more than 200,000 pounds. The authority published the salaries of its executives in its annual report for 2006/7, but the report only included the amount earned so far that year.

A mass demand for supplies and services - from builders and plumbers to snack sellers - means that the Olympics has unparalleled short-term earning potential for local business people.

But Haringey has been left out of an elite group of boroughs which will club together to raise training and job opportunities for the people who live there. They are Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Greenwich,

EAST Londoners will not be given preference when going for jobs involved with the 2012 Olympics, a senior Games official has admitted.

Atos Origin has extended its IT services agreement with the International Olympic Committee through to 2012.