They welcomed extra funding for the Greens' insulation in homes project but said most of the budget offered little hope for new jobs despite Treasury projecting unemployment to rise to 8 percent by 2010.
The Council of Trade Unions (CTU) said today's budget did not doenough to stimulate the jobs market and invest in skills.
"This was always going to be a tough budget requiring difficult choices. But the Government could have done more in the short run to boost employment and has actually reduced planned funding on industry training," said CTU secretary Peter Conway.
Mr Conway said the home insulation programme could have been scaled up and combined with other job creation schemes to really assist the growing numbers of unemployed.
Unemployment forecasts meant many more households and communities would be hit by unemployment as well as creating added cost to the Government, he said.
"Very little was announced in today's budget to directly address those already facing unemployment." And the budget "continues the government's rolling maul of restructuring and job cuts in the public sector", said Public Service Association (PSA) national secretary Brenda Pilott.
Government budget reviews in the public sector had already led to around 1470 jobs being cut, according to PSA estimates.
The PSA was expecting more jobs to be cut despite the Minister of Finance saying the Government was particularly concerned about the need to create new jobs, she said.
The Government wanted more public sector productivity and then imposed a regime of budget reviews and restructuring on public sector workers whose workload was rising because of job cuts, Ms Pilott said.
"The only people who will benefit from this are high paid private sector consultants." The budget also failed to provide job security for New Zealand workers and would only deepen the recession, said the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union, which represents 45,000 workers across 11 industries.
Union acting national secretary Bill Newson said it was a lost opportunity for the Government to help workers.
"The only mention of jobs in this budget was a re-announcement of the nine-day fortnight and the ReStart scheme, both of which are ambulances at the bottom of the economic cliff."
And bank workers' union Finsec says that by allowing the rating agencies to call the tune the Government had delivered a good budget for banks but not for their staff and customers, with its primary focus on reducing debt in order to maintain the country's credit rating.
