Union leaders were meeting today to co-ordinate their response to the government's spending cuts and explore the possibility of staging mass strikes.

The TUC also announced a major march and rally in London on 26 March to protest against the cuts and highlight the damage being caused to public services.

The discussions come ahead of rallies in London and Manchester this weekend in protest at job losses and increases in tuition fees.

Representing workers in both the public and private sectors, the union leaders are meeting at a time when tighter public spending is beginning to translate into staff reductions.

Liverpool city council has announced plans to axe 1,500 jobs as it seeks to make £141m worth of savings by 2013.

The GMB union said local authorities had announced or threatened more than 145,000 job losses. Around 285 councils still have to make decisions on how to cope with fewer financial resources.

Co-ordinated industrial action against proposed job losses is one course of action being examined. Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, said before the meeting: "I hope we'll make good progress towards greater co-ordination between the unions.

"While strike action is always a last resort, it would be the result of the government's refusal to change course and its political choice to press ahead with unnecessary and hugely damaging cuts. It's logical that any industrial action is always more effective if more people are involved and that's what I'll be saying today."

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers is already preparing to ballot its members for industrial action against proposed pension changes and the PCS union is involved in a long-running dispute over compensation payments for civil servants who lose their job.

At the rally in Manchester tomorrow, the TUC assistant general secretary Kay Carberry will warn that the opportunities of young people in the UK must not be sacrificed.

"We will not let young people pay the price for the government's reckless gamble with the economy," she will say, according to extracts of her speech released in advance of the event.

"In the City bankers are popping champagne corks and celebrating their bonuses. It's business as usual for them, while young people up and down Britain are being forced to pick up the tab for a financial crisis and recession that they didn't cause. Nearly one million young people are unemployed, with one in five young people now out of work."

The cabinet office minister, Francis Maude, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he hoped confrontation could be avoided.

"I would like to see us moving to a position where unions instead of sort of looking for a fight approach that Mark Serwotka illustrates, we move to a position much more like that which exists on the continent where unions see themselves as social partners working together with the government as much as possible," he said.

"On a lot of the continent there is a very different approach that unions take which is not any the less concerned with protecting and promoting the interests of their members but which is done very much more in partnership."