Six Post Office workers sent into arbitration on a court judgment that does not exist

Six dismissed South African Post Office workers had their unfair dismissal case sent to arbitration on the strength of a Constitutional Court judgment that does not exist. The Labour Court has now halted that arbitration, and it has done so without making the workers pay for the error.

As Sunday World reported on 27 October, Acting Judge Sean Snyman delivered the ruling on Friday, 23 October. The commissioner had allowed the six to proceed with their dispute despite SAPO being in business rescue, and had cited a supposed judgment titled South African Post Office SOC Ltd (In Business Rescue) and Others v Communication Workers Union and Others, purportedly reported as [2023] ZACC 40, to justify that decision.

There is no such judgment. Snyman searched the SAFLII database and other legal repositories and found no trace of it. He then traced the citation himself and established that it actually belongs to an unrelated Constitutional Court judgment dealing with immigration legislation and spousal visas.

“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,” the judge said.

He opened his ruling with the observation that this appeared to be another case of AI-generated irregularity, of non-existent case law used to substantiate a finding. The court did not identify a particular AI platform, and no direct evidence established which technology the commissioner used. What Snyman did find was that the commissioner appeared to have relied on AI to find authority for his reasoning without independently verifying it, and that this amounted to 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,” he said.

The underlying dispute is ordinary and human. Six SAPO employees were dismissed for alleged misconduct on 2 December 2025 and referred an unfair dismissal dispute to the CCMA. SAPO has been in business rescue since July 2023, and it objected to the arbitration on the grounds that the Companies Act bars legal proceedings against a company in business rescue without permission from its practitioners or the High Court. On 4 August the commissioner dismissed that objection and allowed the employees to pursue their claims.

Beyond the fabricated citation, Snyman found the commissioner had materially misread the Companies Act by disregarding the moratorium on legal proceedings against a company in business rescue, and had failed to address SAPO’s objection that its business rescue practitioners had not been joined to the proceedings.

For the six workers, the practical position is this. The arbitration is halted pending the outcome of SAPO’s separate application to review and set aside the CCMA ruling. Their unfair dismissal claims are not lost. They may pursue them once business rescue ends, or obtain the necessary permission to proceed earlier. They were not legally represented, and Snyman found no order as to costs was justified, holding that they were not responsible for the commissioner’s failures.

That last point matters in a labour system where the CCMA is the first and often only forum most workers ever see. A commissioner’s ruling is supposed to be the place where a shop-floor dispute gets a fair, quick hearing. When the authority at the centre of that ruling turns out to be a legal phantom, the damage is not only to the parties in front of the commissioner. It is to the confidence of every worker and every employer who walks into a CCMA office expecting the law to be applied as written.

Snyman said as much. He warned that allowing arbitration founded on fictitious legal authority to continue would condone illegality and undermine the integrity of the labour justice system, and he called for a zero-tolerance approach to such failures. He also returned to warnings judges have given before, quoting an earlier judgment on the risk of accepting machine-generated research without scrutiny: such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses, but those responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect. Arbitrators who use AI for legal research, he said, are obliged to verify that the judgments they cite exist and to read them to establish whether they support the propositions attributed to them.

The case now sits with SAPO’s review application. Until it is determined, the six dismissed workers wait, their claims intact but their hearing on hold.