The 1990s opened with dizzying political changes which would deeply affect Numsa. The ANC, South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress were unbanned and their leaders were released or returned from exile. At the same time, the civil war that had erupted in Natal in 1987 between the United Democartic Front (UDF) (effectively the ANC's internal wing) and Cosatu representing progressive forces, and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), intensified dramatically and spread to the Transvaal. In August and September 1990 alone, more than a thousand people were killed, many of them Cosatu members.

Von Holdt sees South Africa as going through a ‘triple transition’ in this period – from despotism to democracy, from a closed economy to one exposed to globalisation, and from apartheid to a post-colonial society. After years of isolation, South Africa set out to integrate itself into the global economy by liberalising economic policy whilst undergoing a process of decolonisation involving new class formations and a process of reconstruction. In this transition, Cosatu and Numsa offered a new strategic vision of reconstruction in cooperation with the ANC and the SACP, its new partners in the Tripartite Alliance.

Cosatu and Numsa entered uncharted terrain when confronted by this shift ‘from resistance to reconstruction’ which involved Numsa in taking part in negotiating forums to which business and/or the Nationalist government were party. In 1990, for example, Cosatu entered the National Manpower Commission, where it joined government and business in negotiating labour market policy. Two years later it helped set up the National Economic Forum, where economic policy would be negotiated. In 1993, supported by Numsa, Cosatu mooted the Reconstruction and Development Programme which later became the ANC's election manifesto. Participation in high level negotiations thrust Cosatu and its unions into new arenas of policy making as they aspired to influence the shape of a future economy and the redistribution of wealth. This emphasis on forging policy in civic, economic, and labour areas directly affected Numsa and was, indeed, often initiated by the union.