As the 1990s dawned, rifts within Numsa over the union's changing approach to bargaining became more stark. Some influential leaders began to focus on industrial restructuring in post-apartheid South Africa and to look for a more cooperative negotiating relationship with employers. Members, by contrast, remained locked in a confrontational stance over wages.

Some commentators argue that there is not necessarily a contradiction between members’ focus on money and their leaders’ attempts to broaden bargaining to deliver economic and political gains on the shop floor and in society at large. Kornhauser and others, for example, believe that pay demands in oppressive conditions can assume a symbolic character. ‘A stated goal of higher wages may well veil unverbalised strivings for self-respect and dignity or vague hostilities towards the boss, the machine and the entire industrial discipline.’ Less concrete issues such as frustrated power, inefficient production techniques, and unexpressed racial hostility are not easy to express in the language and structure of collective bargaining, and if questions of principle are involved compromise is hard to reach. A wage demand is easily understood by negotiators and is one that the public can more sympathetically grasp than, say, issues of control in the workplace. As Wellisz puts it: ‘Wage demands provide an excellent rallying cry, and they are accepted by management as falling within the permissible range of labour aspirations.’ Employers are less likely to consider political or directly socialist demands so workers frame demands that they are more likely to win. Viewed in this way membership's focus on money does not mean that they are not aware of the importance of other less negotiable matters. The implication is that unions seeking greater worker control of industry must find other ways of pressing such demands.

The tensions over bargaining policy had surfaced in Numsa before the implementation of the new bargaining programme, when it first raised non-wage restructuring issues in national negotiations. In both the 1991 industry-wide auto strike and the 1992 engineering strike, the demands, which included non-wage matters, resolved themselves into an overriding call for better pay.