Progress in auto was made through the 1995 agreement, but in engineering, the three-year strategy began to unravel. Numsa was confronted with having to build workers’ control in an environment which did not lend itself to the slow, incremental workings that internal union democracy required. Also, its failure to communicate ideas from the research and development groups in 1990, on which much of the threeyear bargaining programme was based, came back to haunt it.

The early 1990s was a dangerous time for Numsa and for workers. The union was embroiled in intense ideological, political, organisational and bargaining complexities. It remained to be seen if Numsa could win real power for its constituency, or if history would record a weak response at a critical time.

Leadership and organisational weakness

It was in engineering that the strongest expectations of wielding power lay, and where the complexity and contradictions were most sharply expressed. It was here that Numsa had experienced its most rapid expansion, which contributed to the intricacy of its organisational and bargaining approaches. Chris Lloyd believed that the union did not acknowledge important differences between engineering and auto and so neglected a large body of members, and that this weakened its ability to implement its new strategy. He commented: