Jon Centres should be barred from carrying adverts for escorts, strippers and lap dancers, Nicola Sturgeon is to tell the UK government.
The deputy first minister condemned the display of "degrading" jobs in the adult entertainment industry as "shocking and unacceptable".
While unemployment legislation is reserved to Westminster, Sturgeon intends to write to Yvette Cooper , the secretary of state for work and pensioners, urging her to take action.
All Job Centres across the UK have been forced to advertise adult entertainment posts since 2003 when the High Court ruled that a previous ban was discriminatory.
While the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has carried out consultations on the issue, it has yet to decide if it will change the law.
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A spokeswoman for Sturgeon, who is also health secretary, said she was losing patience with Westminster's inaction. "The UK Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) carried out a consultation between December 2008 and March 2009 on its policy to accept and advertise jobs within the adult entertainment industry but failed to include the Scottish government in this process," she said.
"For some time [Sturgeon] has been actively investigating this unacceptable state of affairs and is not prepared to wait further for the UK government's consultation report to act on this."
The national Jobcentre Plus website recently carried adverts for a lap dancer in central Edinburgh, offering "competitive rates" for a 37-hour-week "entertaining customers and carrying out pole dances and private dances". The site also carried an advertisement for a £15-an-hour "female naughty nurse" in Glasgow. The job description read: "Duties include interacting with customers in a converted party ambulance. The position may involve semi-nudity and personal contact."
Job centres across the UK advertised 351 vacancies in the adult entertainment industry in 2008. Among the vacancies were 44 for lap dancers, 30 for adult chatline operators, eight for sauna masseuses and a further eight for a topless television channel.
Louise Robertson, of Dumbarton and District Women's Aid, lobbied Sturgeon on the issue when the minister attended group's annual conference. "I am thrilled that Nicola Sturgeon has acted on my comments and this issue is now finally being taken seriously by those in positions of power," she said. "The government agencies who run job centres across the UK are acting as little more than pimps for the porn industry and that has got to stop. These jobs demean women and they have no place in job centres."
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Sandy Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, also welcomed Sturgeon's intervention: "We are hugely concerned by the normalisation of the sex industry by having these adverts displayed in job centres."
However, Dr Tuppy Owens, spokeswoman for the Sexual Freedom Coalition, which campaigns against censorship, felt banning the adverts would be a retrograde step. "I find it bizarre that in the 21st century so-called feminist groups are still trying to dictate what women can and can't choose to do with their own bodies," she said. "The idea that women shouldn't have the right to choose what career they wish to pursue, and need to be protected from themselves, is a throwback to the scowling, Stalinist feminism of the 1980s."
A DWP spokesman said it would consider any letter from the Scottish government.
Job Centre guidelines prevent anyone from being obliged to take jobs in the adult entertainment industry and ban under-18s from replying to the adverts.