Democratic Senator John Kerry has taken yet another swipe at Bermuda in his bid for the US presidency.

In a speech at the University of Toledo in Ohio yesterday, Sen. Kerry said: “If I'm president, our government won't provide a single reward for shipping our jobs overseas, or exploiting the tax code to go to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes while sticking the American people with the bill.”

Sen. Kerry has become more vociferous in his attacks on Bermuda as the race for the White House heats up and yesterday's remarks are just the latest in a string of comments which started in spring 2003.

Sen. Kerry has pledged to try to stop companies moving to Bermuda to avoid taxes and has threatened to take government contracts away from Bermuda companies.

Yesterday the front-runner for the Democratic nomination emphasised his support for the working man by pledging to stop jobs from being shipped overseas, or “offshore”.

He proposed that companies should be made to give a three-month warning before factory jobs are exported, a challenge to President George W. Bush's policies and to rival Senator John Edwards' efforts to attract American workers to his struggling campaign.

“Companies will no longer be able to surprise their workers with a pink slip instead of a paycheque - they will be required to give workers three months notice if their jobs are being exported offshore,” Sen. Kerry said in yesterday's speech in Toledo, where he picked up an endorsement from former astronaut and retired Senator John Glenn.

“Here's what I'm going to tell our corporate leaders: We will give you all the help you need to create new jobs and strengthen our economy.”

In Ohio, one of next week's ten-state Super Tuesday elections he hopes to win to bring an end to the Edwards campaign, Sen. Kerry said 270,000 workers had lost their jobs during the Bush years. He was set to launch a new campaign commercial in the state and in New York describing Bush's economic policy as “an astonishing failure” and promising to protect US jobs.

Two weeks after the president's chief economic adviser called the shipping of US jobs abroad “just a new way of doing international trade”, Sen. Kerry said President Bush lavished special favours on corporations while workers lost their jobs, their pensions and their retirement savings.

Sen. Kerry said he will require companies that plan to outsource jobs overseas to inform the affected workers, the Labour Department, state agencies responsible for helping laid-off employees and local government officials. The Labour Department would be required to compile statistics of jobs sent offshore and report them on an annual basis to Congress.

While meeting yesterday morning with about 30 workers at a steel plant in Cleveland, Sen. Kerry said he would review all trade agreements in his first four months in office. “I don't want to be protectionist because I think that's the wrong thing to do for America, but I think what we have to do is be smart,” he said.

Sen. Kerry campaigned in Ohio after winning delegate elections on Tuesday in Utah, Idaho and Hawaii, earning 18 wins in 20 contests and denying Sen. Edwards another opportunity to add to his single victory in the race for the nomination.