‘Numsa wants to approach bargaining as a process and not an event any more!’ declared Numsa Info in the wake of the devastating 1992 engineering strike. Adversarial bargaining held the danger of destroying the industry, but its limits were also revealing themselves in other ways.

In its early years, Numsa had built power through a focussed living wage campaign which had resulted in metal workers flocking to join, and in Numsa's becoming the dominant union in the industry. By the early 1990s, however, it could no longer sustain this tactic, as national organiser Marie explained: ‘We did it for a while, and it exhausted us because the logistics were enormous. We did achieve some significant things but it reached its limit.’

By the early 1990s, Numsa's ‘shopping list of demands’ was making negotiations overly long and complex. Smith recalled: ‘They [Nicisemi] have this preliminary meeting with all the unions present, and we basically motivate our proposal – this goes on for weeks. And the serious bargaining only takes place towards the end of June, and the agreement is about to expire; now people start getting serious.’ In negotiations Numsa dropped half of its demands, and after the agreement was signed there was little time left in the year to implement it. ‘You'd start at the beginning of the year, until about August/September finalising, then three months and you're back on the treadmill,’ said Geoff Schreiner. The union was caught in a cycle of tabling and dropping demands, only to retable them the following year.

This frustrating cycle led it to consider a three-year agreement which allowed for a reasonable bargaining period and provided time for implementation. Thus the ‘three-year bargaining programme’ originated as an organising tool but later became linked to Numsa's emerging ideas on industrial restructuring.

Debating restructuring

From 1990, the union began holding policy workshops on the economy. These discussions led Numsa to believe that the macroeconomy, the metal industry and the shop floor were connected in ways that required centralised bargaining and could not be addressed at the workplace alone.