Six Post Office workers, one fake judgment: how a CCMA case can be built on case law that does not exist

A CCMA commissioner who wants to let a dismissed worker take on a company in business rescue has to answer one question first: does the law allow the case to proceed at all? The answer sits in the Companies Act, and it does not bend because a worker’s claim looks fair.

That is the rule at the centre of a Labour Court judgment delivered on Friday, 23 October by Acting Judge Sean Snyman. As Sunday World reported on 27 October, the commissioner had allowed six dismissed South African Post Office employees to pursue an unfair dismissal dispute at the CCMA. To justify that, he cited a Constitutional Court judgment titled South African Post Office SOC Ltd (In Business Rescue) and Others v Communication Workers Union and Others, reported as [2023] ZACC 40. The judgment does not exist.

Here is how the machinery is meant to work.

When a company enters business rescue, the Companies Act places a moratorium on legal proceedings against it. Creditors, employees and anyone else with a claim cannot simply haul the company before a court or a tribunal while the rescue is running. They need permission, either from the business rescue practitioner or from the High Court. The purpose is to give the company room to be rescued rather than picked apart by a queue of claims that would sink it before it could be saved. SAPO has been in business rescue since July 2023.

The CCMA is the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, the statutory body where most unfair dismissal disputes in South Africa land before they reach the Labour Court. A commissioner is the person who hears the case and issues a ruling. A commissioner’s ruling can be taken on review to the Labour Court, which is what SAPO did.

So a worker at a company in business rescue faces a procedural gate before the merits of the dismissal are ever heard. The commissioner has to decide whether the case may proceed. If the practitioner or the court has not given permission, the correct answer is that the arbitration cannot go ahead for now.

What happened here is that the commissioner dismissed SAPO’s objection on 4 August and ruled the employees could proceed. The authority he relied on, according to the Labour Court, was a phantom. Snyman established that the citation actually belonged to an unrelated Constitutional Court judgment about immigration legislation and spousal visas, and that a search of the SAFLII database and other legal repositories turned up no trace of the SAPO judgment at all.

“The undeniable reality is that the ruling of the first respondent is squarely founded on purported reasoning contained in a judgment that does not exist,” Snyman said. He concluded the commissioner must have relied on AI to find substantiation for his reasoning, and that the failure to verify the authority was a serious breach of the diligence and competence expected of an arbitrator. “Considering that this non-existed legal authority lies at the heart of the conclusion that he ultimately came to, this is a fundamental failure of justice.”

The court did not identify an AI platform, and it did not establish through direct evidence which technology was used. What it did establish is that the judgment was cited and that it was not real.

Snyman found a second problem with the ruling. The commissioner had, in the court’s view, materially misread the Companies Act by disregarding the moratorium, and had failed to address SAPO’s objection that its business rescue practitioners had not been joined to the arbitration proceedings.

The consequence is a halt, not a burial. The Labour Court stopped the arbitration pending SAPO’s separate application to review and set aside the CCMA ruling. The six employees, dismissed for alleged misconduct on 2 December 2025, keep their unfair dismissal claims. They may pursue them once the business rescue ends, or they may obtain the necessary permission to proceed earlier. Snyman made no order as to costs, finding that the workers, who were not legally represented, were not responsible for the commissioner’s failures.

For anyone else sitting in a similar position, the practical lesson is about who carries the risk of a bad procedural ruling. The workers in this case did not pay for it. The commissioner’s error stopped the case, but it did not extinguish the claim.

The wider point the judge made is about verification. Arbitrators who use AI for legal research, he said, are obliged to check that cited judgments exist and to read them to see whether they actually support the proposition being attributed to them. He quoted an earlier judgment on the danger of accepting machine-generated research without scrutiny: “Such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect.”

That is the mechanism a reader should take from this. A citation in a ruling is not decoration. It is the load-bearing wall. When the wall turns out to be painted on, the ruling falls, and the people waiting behind it wait longer.