Labour Court halts a Post Office CCMA case after the commissioner cites a judgment that doesn't exist

The Labour Court has stopped a CCMA arbitration involving the South African Post Office after finding that the commissioner hearing it based a key ruling on a court judgment that does not exist. Acting Judge Sean Snyman, in a judgment delivered on 23 October and reported by MyBroadband, said it appeared that "Commissioner Fakude must have relied on AI" to find support for his reasoning.

Until now, most South African fake-citation cases have involved lawyers. This one involves a CCMA commissioner, the official whose ruling is meant to settle a workplace dispute quickly and cheaply, often for workers and small employers who appear without a lawyer to check the authorities being relied on. The quotes below are as MyBroadband reported them. The judgment itself had not appeared on SAFLII by 28 October, so this account rests on that report, with one citation checked independently.

What the commissioner decided

The dispute involves six former Post Office employees who were dismissed for alleged misconduct on 2 December 2025 and referred unfair dismissal claims to the CCMA. The Post Office has been in business rescue since 2023. The Companies Act moratorium blocks unfair dismissal proceedings against a company in rescue unless the High Court grants leave or the business rescue practitioners agree in writing. That is the gate the commissioner had to deal with before the dismissals could be arbitrated at all.

Commissioner Menzi Fakude ruled that the arbitration could go ahead. He found that "business rescue does not suspend the operation of labour legislation", citing "South African Post Office SOC Ltd (In Business Rescue) and Others v Communication Workers Union and Others [2023] ZACC 40".

On that citation, the moratorium did not stand in the way. The Post Office told the Labour Court that the judgment did not exist. If the citation is empty, the reason the commissioner gave for letting the case proceed falls away with it, and the six workers are back where they were: dismissed, and waiting on a process the court has now stopped.

The case that citation actually is

Snyman checked the citation and agreed with the Post Office. The citation [2023] ZACC 40 belongs to Rayment and Others v Minister of Home Affairs, a December 2023 Constitutional Court ruling on spousal visas under the Immigration Act. SA Tech News confirmed that identification against the Constitutional Court record. "The case has nothing to do with business rescue and the rights of employees under the LRA," Snyman wrote.

A search of SAFLII turned up related Post Office cases, but all of them predate the business rescue. There is a real body of Post Office litigation. None of it, on that search, is a 2023 Constitutional Court judgment holding that business rescue leaves labour law untouched. The name in the citation sounds like a Post Office case. The neutral citation belongs to a visa case.

Snyman called it "an untenable state of affairs and a complete failure" on the commissioner's part, noting that AI responses "may make confident assertions that are simply untrue". He interdicted the CCMA and Fakude from proceeding and stayed the arbitration under case number FSWK 2876-25.

The failure he described is specific. A commissioner does not need a law library the size of a judge's chambers, but he does need the case he names to exist, and to say what he says it says. Here the named case exists and says something else, about visas. The workers and the employer in a CCMA hearing are often unrepresented. They cannot be expected to spot a citation that looks formal and is pointed at the wrong statute.

Earlier cases, and why this one is different

Fake citations have reached South African courts before. Legal scholar and data scientist Damien Charlotin's international database of AI hallucination cases lists six South African incidents. The first, in a Johannesburg regional court in 2023, was treated leniently. Later cases were referred to the Legal Practice Council. Those matters concerned lawyers, who have a professional duty to check what they put in front of a court, and a regulator that can discipline them.

In July, Judge K Allen-Yaman of the Labour Court stayed disciplinary hearings against three Matjhabeng Local Municipality employees after finding that the chairperson's ruling relied on authorities that either did not exist or did not say what they were cited for. "If they were indeed generated by an AI 'assistant', the ruling cannot stand," she wrote. That chairperson was running an internal workplace hearing. Fakude was running a statutory arbitration.

The Post Office matter moves the problem from workplace hearings and legal practitioners to the statutory dispute body itself. The CCMA's point is speed and access. A ruling that cannot be checked by the people in the room, because the authority does not exist, undermines that point even when the underlying dismissal dispute is still undecided.

What the order does not decide

Snyman's order stops the arbitration. It does not decide whether the six workers were fairly dismissed. It does not decide whether the business-rescue moratorium, properly applied, blocks their claims. The Post Office's application to exit business rescue was still pending when the case was heard, so the moratorium may not be a permanent feature of whatever hearing eventually takes place.

MyBroadband's report carried no response from the CCMA. SA Tech News could find no published CCMA guidance on how commissioners may use generative AI. Until that guidance exists, the only public standard in this case is the one Snyman applied: a citation that does not exist, or that decides a different question, cannot carry a ruling, and an explanation that points to an AI tool does not repair it.

The six employees remain dismissed. Their claims are stayed under FSWK 2876-25. The judgment that stayed them was not on SAFLII on 28 October. When it is posted, the quotes in this account can be read against the text rather than against a news report.

Sources: MyBroadband, 27 October 2026, reporting the judgment of Snyman AJ delivered on 23 October; Rayment and Others v Minister of Home Affairs [2023] ZACC 40, confirmed on the Constitutional Court record; ITWeb, 22 July 2026, on the Matjhabeng hearings. The Labour Court judgment was not on SAFLII on 28 October 2026.