At the car manufacturers Toyota, Unite union representative Peter Tsouvallaris says “members are reminded daily of the tremendous insecurity the recession has brought to our industry”. After negotiations with management at Toyota, and faced with cuts in jobs and wages, the union has been able to recommend measures that as Peter says “will present a real opportunity to restore some measure of stability to Toyota in the coming months”.

Where companies are in difficulties, unions have been able to put together alternative business plans which show not only alternative cost savings but also show how the employer’s proposals would have a negative effect on future growth and development with the loss of skills and know-how which go with the loss of staff through redundancy.

• The number of people in involuntary temporary jobs – meaning that they’re doing these jobs because they can’t find permanent ones – is increasing, as is the number of people in involuntary part-time work.
• Also, we are starting to see large increases in the number of longer term unemployed. There have been sharp rises in the number of people unemployed for between 6 and 12 months and over 12 months.
• Finally, analysis of the recessions in the 1980s and 1990s reveals that unemployment levels and rates did not return to their pre-recession points for some time after the recession had finished. In respect of the 1990s recession, it wasn’t until seven years after the recession began that unemployment returned to the pre-recession level.

My concern is that we are losing people from the type of jobs that are less difficult to organise – permanent and full-time (density amongst part-time workers is 21.5 per cent – amongst full-time workers density is 29.5 per cent) and from the labour force entirely, many workers who may be union members or at least union supporters.

Whilst it’s hard to predict what the ultimate impact of all of this will be on union membership, when you take into account the above and predictions of large cuts in public spending, I can’t imagine any scenario where union density over the next few years remains as stable as it has recently.

So, what to be done in terms of the organising challenges that unions and the TUC will face? The TUC’s Organising and Representation Task Group will be grappling with this issue over the coming months, but here are five brief thoughts about what unions can do and the TUC can support them in doing;

1. Make the case for unions – loudly and proudly – in workplaces and communities. The recession (and its causes) has pushed traditional ‘union’ issues higher up the public’s agenda. We need to stress the value and importance of being in a union at these uncertain times.
2. Organise where we have recognition. In unionised workplaces there are some 3 million people that aren’t union members and many of these have never been asked. We need to make sure that we have the maximum density possible in all workplaces where we are recognised.
3. Get reps involved in organising and give them additional support. Reps are a vital resource for unions and have a major impact on how members and non-members regard the union in terms of its relevance and effectiveness, and they are obviously best placed to recruit non-members in unionised workplaces. We need more reps, but also more members who are active in the life of the union and to achieve this we need to think how we make union activity look not only relevant and effective but also feasible and practical.
4. Think about how and where we organise. Union membership has never declined because of too much organising, but we need to think more carefully about where we allocate our resources and concentrate our efforts. How do we get access to the workers that we want to organise? Is it possible to organise across sectors? Can we broaden our base by working more effectively within communities and with community organisations? How do we make better use of new technology?
5. Find more resources to do all of this and more. Can we increase the resources we get from employers (facilities and facility time)? How do we make most use of the resources that we already have? Is there a positive impact for the union in terms of new members, activists, increased profile and improved perceptions of relevance and effectiveness from all that we do?

British trade unionists will get the chance to follow suit on Saturday 28 March when the TUC and others are calling on us all to Put People First: March for Jobs, Justice and Climate.

I was in China recently as part of a TUC team (with negotiators from the GMB and Unite) discussing collective bargaining with Chinese trade unionists a couple of hours inland from Shanghai. Their conception of trade union organisation and collective bargaining is very different from ours (far more top down and paternalist to put it mildly) but things were changing. Rampant growth and inflation meant that past collective bargaining models such as simply writing down the legal minima couldn’t work for wage settlements. And as foreign owned companies dig deeper into China’s labour market, and domestic entrepreneurs look more like those multinationals than post-state owned enterprises, externally imposed trade union officials are less and less able to cope.

Now the global recession is beginning to bite, and the number of autonomous protests is increasing. Unions are beginning to grasp that the law will be better for them if they have had a hand in writing it and fighting off employer attempts to water it down (the law helped the ACFTU unionise Wal-Mart, and the US Chamber of Commerce lobbied actively but unsuccessfully to reduce workers’ rights in the latest round of legislative reform). And workers recognise that, as Jerome Cohen of New York University says in the FT, “Chinese workers have learnt that collective action is effective” when factories close. Meanwhile the state has held back from cracking down on such protests, as it did when China last faced mass unemployment due to privatising or closing down state owned enterprises in the 1990s.

For the ACFTU, the fork in the road is getting closer. They will soon need to choose whether to be on the workers’ side or the state’s. If they choose the workers, they will need to decide whether they can survive by being more effective organisations for workers (basically, like an NGO or Citizens Advice) or whether to follow the free trade union movement’s organising model, becoming organisations of workers? If they do the latter, then the option of reverting to being part of the repressive state apparatus is closed off, and the Chinese Communist Party will need to decide whether to rein the trade unions in again (as Mao did) or let them find their own destiny.

Our role must surely be to continue to engage, especially where we share multinational employers, and demonstrate the efficacy of the free, organising model of trade unions.

Fear of unemployment, the potential impact of the recession on household incomes, and the prospect of things getting much worse before they get better, mean there are very few people who will be untouched by the downturn. In recognition of this fact the TUC, with the support of Citizens Advice, has produced a ‘Guide to Dealing with the Economic Downturn’. As well as containing advice about employment rights and dealing with redundancy, the guide covers issues as diverse as dealing with debt and how to access skills and training. Its a useful publication – and its just one very small element of the work that unions and the TUC are undertaking to try and defend our members in these incredibly uncertain times.

But defending our existing members is not enough. Yes we need to fight to save jobs, and do the best we can to maintain terms and conditions in the face of concerted action by some employers to roll them back (see here for an example). But we need to do more than just play defence. Now is the perfect time to get out and make the positive case for unions – to show we CAN make a difference, and there is a value in union membership. Easier said then done I know when union officers and reps are swamped by a whole raft of competing pressures  – but I think its vital that we use this period to get out and stress the value of unions to individual workers and to the UK economy as a whole.

Union decline over the past three decades is part of the story of how we got into this mess in the first place. Industrially, weakened unions have found it hard to hold boardrooms to account (the growing gap between boardroom and shop floor pay during most of this period is clear evidence of this); politically, weaker unions have found their ability to influence Government’s diminished. The failed ‘neo-liberal market-always-knows-best’ agenda (castigated here in the TUC’s New Years message) was underpinned by a vicious circle of union decline: ’weaker, marginalised unions -> greater deregulation and labour market ‘flexibility’ -> weaker, marginalised unions’. We need to break this destructive circle. Unions are good for workers, and (whisper it), they are also pretty good for business, and society as a whole.

So lets make 2009 the year when we grasp the membership nettle. Lets make it the year when we try and win the 3m workers in unionised workplaces who aren’t union members (2m of whom claim they’ve never been asked to join); the year we reach out to Britain’s 2m (and, I suspect, rising) ‘vulnerable’ workers – 500,000 of whom work in unionised workplaces or companies; and the year where we articulate the positive case for strong, effective, independent trade unions.