As the first political prisoners were freed in September 1989, South Africa moved into a period of transition and Numsa was abruptly confronted with an altered political landscape for which it was ill prepared. Just three months before, Mayekiso had declared: ‘There will be a negotiated settlement at some stage, but at the present moment those chances are nil.’ The union's education department responded by organising countrywide seminars for leadership to discuss how to respond to a negotiate d settlement. When banned organisations were legalised in February 1990, Numsa set up strategic think-tanks to enable labour to influence the ANC's under - prepared blueprint for the assumption of power. The union movement was facing its final challenge before South Africa embarked on its first democratic elections in the closin g days of apartheid. Would it be able to insert a socialist programme into this transitional landscape?

Many commentators have cast doubt on the ability of unions to effect fundamental change. Lane, for example, notes that ‘unionism was … about the power of organised labour to confront the power of organised capital. Trade unionism was a … continuing assertion of a fundamental cleavage of interest, yet … because of its insistence on the regulation of that conflict, it could not be a vehicle of its abolition.’ Anderson declares that ‘unions do not challenge the existence of a society based on a division of classes, they merely express it. They bargain within the society, but do not transform it.’ Webster and others, however, point to the contradictory roles that shop stewards in South Africa played, noting that South African shop stewards differed from their British counterparts owing to the leadership role they played in political organisations which meant that their identities were forged by class contradictions at the point of production and by their role in the political struggle. This dual role opened up the possibility for shop stewards to serve as agents of systemic change in the mould of Gramsci's commissione interna.