Workplace Bullying Case Law South Africa: 2026 CCMA Rulings

For most of its history, South African occupational health and safety law has been preoccupied with the visible and the physical: hard hats, harnesses, machine guards, incident registers. Bullying, by contrast, was long treated as a management-style problem rather than a legal one. That distinction has been narrowing for years, and 2026 has supplied the clearest workplace bullying case law in South Africa yet that it has effectively closed. Two CCMA awards handed down this year, one upholding the dismissal of a bully and the other finding an employer liable for tolerating one, sit alongside a newly commenced amendment to the workplace injury compensation framework that, for the first time, places a diagnosed psychological injury on the same statutory footing as a physical one. Academic surveys have repeatedly found that close to a third of South African employees report having experienced workplace bullying, and CCMA conference data shows that one in five South Africans will experience a depressive disorder in their lifetime. Read together, the message is unambiguous: psychological safety is no longer a wellness initiative sitting alongside compliance. It is compliance.

What Workplace Bullying Case Law in South Africa Establishes

The legal starting point is the Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace, published under the Employment Equity Act (EEA) on 18 March 2022, replacing a narrower 2005 code that dealt only with sexual harassment. The 2022 Code was drafted to align South Africa with the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 190 on the elimination of violence and harassment in the world of work, which the country ratified in November 2021. Section 6(3) of the EEA defines harassment of an employee as a form of unfair discrimination, and the Code gives that provision real substance, capturing physical and sexual abuse, the impairment of dignity, the creation of a hostile environment, and psychological and emotional abuse, while extending beyond the conventional employer-employee relationship to job applicants, volunteers, interns, clients, contractors, and suppliers. Critically, neither the Code nor the CCMA require proof of a harasser’s intention: the test turns on effect, not motive, asking whether a reasonable person in the recipient’s position would have experienced the conduct as demeaning, humiliating, or hostile. Section 60 of the EEA requires employers to take proactive and remedial steps to prevent harassment, and an employer that fails to act appropriately within a reasonable time of a complaint can be held vicariously liable regardless of whether the conduct was one dramatic incident or a slow accumulation of smaller ones.

Constructive Dismissal Bullying South Africa: The Rand Water Award

A CCMA award involving Rand Water, reported in July 2026, shows how seriously commissioners now weigh cumulative conduct. The employee at the centre of the dispute had started in a strong position, attending executive meetings and receiving praise from senior leadership. Within months, her manager began reassigning her work to a more junior colleague, excluded her from meetings, criticised her publicly in front of colleagues and clients, labelled her incompetent, and routed communication through her own subordinate instead of through her. Looked at individually, several of these acts might have passed for ordinary management friction; looked at together, the commissioner concluded they amounted to a steady undermining of the employee’s psychological wellbeing. She raised her concerns internally and lodged a formal grievance, but the process moved slowly, timeframes were missed, and the conduct continued while the grievance sat unresolved. She resigned and referred a constructive dismissal claim under section 186(1)(e) of the Labour Relations Act. The commissioner applied the test set out in Strategic Liquor Services v Mvumbi NO, asking not whether resignation was the employee’s only option, but whether the employer, judged objectively, made continued employment intolerable, and found the manager’s conduct belittling, humiliating, degrading, and uncalled for. Rather than compensation, the commissioner ordered reinstatement elsewhere in the organisation, since the problem traced to a specific manager rather than the employer as a whole, a reminder that a commissioner can reorder an organisation rather than simply order a cheque.

Abuse of Positional Power Dismissal: The Wits Award

If the Rand Water award shows how the law treats employers who look away, a separate CCMA award reported in June 2026, NEHAWU obo Mosimane v University of the Witwatersrand, shows how it treats the individual doing the bullying, even a senior, long-serving one. A Senior Faculty Officer with more than 22 years of service was dismissed after a string of complaints from junior colleagues accusing her of bullying, intimidation, humiliation, and harassment, including routinely shouting at and publicly embarrassing subordinates and withholding training before criticising the resulting performance shortfalls. Two aspects of the award stand out. First, the commissioner treated the abuse of positional power as an aggravating feature rather than something incidental, and long service and seniority did not act as mitigating factors; if anything, they raised the stakes, since the misconduct was enabled by exactly the authority the employee held. Second, her response counted heavily against her: rather than engaging with the complaints, she maintained they were fabricated by colleagues acting in concert, an explanation the commissioner dismissed as implausible given how many independent complainants would have had to coordinate false accounts. Her continued denial and lack of remorse were treated as aggravating factors in their own right, and dismissal was upheld as both procedurally and substantively fair.

COIDA Psychological Injury South Africa: A New Compensation Pathway

How a harassment claim is framed also determines where, and by whom, it is decided, and what it is worth. An ordinary or constructive dismissal dispute grounded in bullying, like both matters above, is arbitrated directly by a CCMA commissioner and capped under section 194(1) of the LRA at 12 months’ remuneration. Where a dismissal is found to be automatically unfair because it is linked to unlawful discrimination, section 194(3) raises that cap to 24 months, and broader unfair discrimination disputes not brought via the dismissal route generally fall within the Labour Court’s exclusive jurisdiction once CCMA conciliation has failed. A separate, newer development extends employer exposure beyond dismissal disputes altogether. The Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Amendment Act 10 of 2022 was finally brought into force in 2026 by Presidential Proclamation, with its provisions phased in across January and April. Among its more significant changes, the amendment formally recognises post-traumatic stress disorder as a compensable occupational disease. This does not turn every bullying grievance into a compensation claim, since PTSD recognition is most obviously aimed at acute traumatic incidents rather than slow-burning interpersonal conduct, but it is the clearest legislative signal yet that the compensation architecture built for physical injury now runs alongside diagnosed psychological harm.

How LBD Consultants Manages Harassment Compliance Risk South Africa

• Audit for patterns, not just flashpoints: exclusion from meetings, being bypassed in communication, and public undermining rarely look serious individually, but commissioners now assess them cumulatively.
• Treat delay as a source of liability: a grievance process that stalls compounds the harm rather than evidencing due process.
• Reassess how seniority factors into discipline: abused authority is an aggravating factor, not a mitigating one.
• Update harassment policies to mirror the 2022 Code, and train managers specifically, including those who would never think of themselves as bullies.

LBD Consultants’ Employment Equity Division, working alongside the HR and Labour Law Divisions, helps IT, engineering, training, and skills development sector employers audit harassment policies against the 2022 Code, fix grievance processes before they stall, and train managers on the effect-not-intent standard now driving CCMA outcomes. Contact LBD Consultants today to review your harassment policy and grievance process.