FRANKFURT (AFP) - Rising labour costs threaten to entrench inflation that has hit new records, European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet warned on Friday in a press interview with several eurozone newspapers.

"The rise in unit labour costs is an indication that we have to take into account" when striving to prevent inflation caused by soaring oil and food prices from becoming a long-term problem, Trichet said.

He spoke to leading newspapers from France, Germany, Ireland and Portugal, presenting the ECB's "message" that although the bank "cannot change today the prices of oil and commodities," it was committed to preventing a second round of inflation from emerging through increased prices for services and wages.

Those were "risks that we had to counter" by raising the bank's main lending rate this month to 4.25 percent despite signs that economic growth was slowing down.

The bank sought to curb inflation which hit a record 4.0 percent in June, double its target of just below 2.0 percent.

"We see signs that we have to take seriously," including "schemes in which nominal wages are indexed to consumer prices," Trichet said.

His comments appeared aimed at persuading the eurozone's population of 320 million people to accept temporary economic hardship in exchange for the prospect of sustainable growth in the future.

Indexing wages to inflation could provoke a wage-price spiral that would undercut employment, and one of the eurozone's major achievements was the creation of 15.7 million jobs in the past nine years.

Trichet also told the newspapers -- Le Figaro, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Irish Times and the Jornal de Negocios -- that the bank expected economic growth to dip in the second and third quarters of 2008 before "a progressive return to ongoing moderate growth."

He acknowledged the risks that growth could be weaker than expected and suggested the ECB did not see the international fiancial crisis nearing an end.

Trichet forecast further "episodes of turbulence, episodes of a high level of volatility and of hectic market behaviour."

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