ECONOMISTS and politicians are referring to this moment as the great recession to come. 

As furlough ends, as spending plummets, as markets shrink and redundancies and cuts tsunami across the economy, trade unions will be left to defend our people from poverty and despair — our historic mission which sometimes we have failed to accept. Some theorists also suggest that trade unions will decline in numbers and power during recession. 

As workers chase jobs that are disappearing and as those still in work desperately cling onto them, then so it goes that the unions will lose even more power and that the consequences of not making hay while the sun shines will hit us. 

Make no mistake, unions are not starting from a great place. Union density nationally is about 26 per cent. Among young workers it is 4.4 per cent. 

Across the public sector, the big trade unions, such as Unison, for all of our successes, are a minority of the workforce, at best only reaching 45 per cent density. 

Slogans about “real change” or calls for “steady as she goes” are not going to cut it. 

The problem is that the power to change things has fallen out of our hands and we must think much more deeply about how to reverse the decline and build real power for working people. 

First, we must stop thinking about organising as recruitment. They are not the same. 

Too often the debate simply focuses on density and leads to new and sometimes innovative recruitment ideas with services offered in return for paid membership. 

Or even using employed organisers to essentially launch recruitment drives or to deliver case work that hard-pressed union activists do not have the time to do.

This is fundamentally wrong. Union organising is about building power in the workplace and sustaining it. 

Sustained recruitment is simply an outcome of good organising. We must have a national strategy of where and how we want to build this power. 

That strategy must be to prioritise certain employers and certain sectors to create a majority organised union in parts of the economy where we can exercise union power. After which we must never hesitate to use that power. 

Union resources and effort cannot happen all over the union all at once. This scatter-gun approach will bring some small successes — but it will not, in the long run, be decisive in changing the balance of power in the workplace. We need a focused national organising strategy. 

We should line up our organising targets and take them down one by one. If we fail to win in one, we regroup and go onto the next.

That national strategy must be informed by the best research and intelligence, by our political priorities and our resources. 

Unison has a significant annual income derived entirely from the subscriptions of our 1.3 million members. 

Unison branches also hold significant reserves waiting for a rainy day. Well, we are in the eye of the storm and every penny of the union’s finances must be scrutinised and assessed for what is it contributing towards building real power for our members in the workplace. 

If it isn’t contributing, it is to be diverted into organising — organising to hurt those who are cutting our members’ jobs, wages and living standards.

We must invest in our allies. That means scrutinising what we get from our allies and switching the funding to where it is most effective. 

If rents, A-level results, PPE, racism, equality are our members’ biggest concerns then we need to invest in and partner those organisations and make them part of our organising. 

Workers who, for example, face rent problems should be presented with a union that immediately taps into fighting for collective solutions — and puts its resources into it. 

Additionally, Unison spends significant resources every year on affiliations to the Labour Party, the TUC and international bodies. 

We should switch our demands on these organisations towards a more organising-centric approach that prioritises what our members need or, if they can’t or won’t change, then we should review our level of contributions. 

I am proposing an ambitious yet entirely achievable national target of 100,000 active members of Unison and a goal of two million members. 

If we get the trained reps the new members will follow. Train them, equip them, empower them. 

Active members of the union are the solution to most problems we face, but we have been treating them is if they are the problem. 

Unison must not become a call centre where the union simply becomes a voice on the end of the phone or a digital one-stop shop. 

Neither must we deploy organisers as if they were human life-support machines. 

Organisers must be concentrated and focused on branch-building and leader identification and not on recruitment. 

Sustainable recruitment is best carried out in workplaces by workers talking with other workers and being visible in the workplace. 

Organisers deployed everywhere are not the solution. Organisers deployed towards strategic targets are the way forward. 

Unison recruits around 160,000 new members every year and most years show, against the odds, a small increase in membership. 

Building sustainability into our national strategy is key element of organising, an element that is new to Unison. 

If we managed to stop half of these members leaving, our numbers would be going up 80,000 a year for a start. 

To go back to where we started, in a great recession the orthodoxy is that militancy declines and workers retreat. 

I reject that notion. Militancy declines and workers retreat when we lose, when we endure defeat after defeat. 

In the 1930s trade union membership went into decline. Of course, it is true that the recession had much to do with it. But it started with the betrayal of the 1926 General Strike and the defeat of the Mineworkers Federation. 

We can fight and win in a recession — but only in certain places and with clear strategies to achieve it. 

In austerity we can organise and we can win. We need a plan and the resources. I am offering both within Unison and a blueprint for the rest of the movement.

Roger McKenzie is assistant general secretary of Unison. He is standing for election to  be general secretary of the union.