South Africa’s Labour Appeal Court has handed down a judgment that fundamentally reshapes how employers and disciplinary tribunals must approach racial accusations in the workplace, ruling that an employee who calls a manager a “white racist” is not automatically guilty of racist behaviour and cannot automatically be dismissed on that basis alone.
The judgment, delivered on 8 April 2026 in Commercial Stevedoring Agricultural and Allied Workers Union obo Vuyani Qomoyi v CCMA and Others, marks a significant departure from the approach taken by both the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration and the Labour Court in the same matter. It is likely to reverberate across disciplinary hearings and workplace policies for years to come.
The case originated at Namaqua Wines, one of the Western Cape’s established wine producers, where a trade union shop steward was unexpectedly summoned to the human resources office by his white manager. On arrival, he witnessed the manager inform a black colleague — without any prior process involving the shop steward in his representative capacity — that he had been dismissed. The shop steward believed the dismissal to be procedurally flawed and unfair. A confrontation followed in which he repeatedly accused the manager of being a “white racist” and of targeting black employees for dismissal.
The employer subsequently charged the shop steward with, amongst other things, displaying racist behaviour. He was dismissed. The dismissal was upheld by a CCMA commissioner, and that outcome was confirmed when the matter came before the Labour Court on review. The shop steward appealed to the LAC.
The central question before the LAC was not whether the words used were offensive or inappropriate in a workplace context, but whether they constituted racist conduct in law. The distinction is meaningful, and the court’s answer to it has implications that extend well beyond the facts of this particular case.
The CCMA and Labour Court had approached the matter by effectively treating the words as a racist tirade at the outset and then asking whether the employee had any justification for them. The LAC found that sequence to be legally flawed. Before asking whether conduct was justified, a court or tribunal must first determine whether the conduct was racist at all — assessed objectively and in full context. The Labour Court had gone further, holding that accusing someone of racism without truth, cause, or justification was itself a racist act. The LAC expressly rejected that proposition as inconsistent with established legal precedent.
The correct standard, the LAC confirmed, is the objective test laid down in Rustenburg Platinum Mine v SAEWA obo Bester, a 2018 judgment approved by the Constitutional Court. That test asks whether a reasonable, objective, and informed person — aware of the full facts and the entire context — would perceive the words as racist or derogatory. Crucially, the test does not turn on the subjective feelings of the person to whom the words were directed.
Applying that standard, the LAC examined the circumstances in which the accusation was made. The shop steward had not launched an unprovoked attack. His words were a reaction to what he genuinely, and not unreasonably as a shop steward, perceived to be a procedurally unfair dismissal of a black worker by a white manager. The court found that his words were an expression of frustration and opinion about what he perceived as injustice, not an assertion of racial superiority or an attempt to demean the manager because of his race.
The LAC placed particular weight on historical and societal context. South Africa’s apartheid history, and the structural power imbalance that persists between white managers and black workers in many employment settings, cannot be legally irrelevant when assessing whether words carry a racially demeaning intention. Given that history and that power dynamic, the court found it inconceivable that the shop steward intended to devalue the manager as a member of the white race. The intent and context of an utterance, assessed against the country’s social history, are as important as the words themselves.
The LAC concluded that the CCMA commissioner had committed a reviewable error by failing to apply the binding Bester test, and that the Labour Court had compounded that error rather than correcting it. The employee was found not guilty of racist behaviour. His dismissal was held to be substantively unfair, the appeal was upheld, and the employer was ordered to reinstate him retrospectively.
The judgment draws a line that employers and HR practitioners will need to understand clearly. Calling a manager a racist may be disrespectful, insolent, or insubordinate — conduct that could properly be addressed through discipline. But insolence and racism are not the same thing in law. Racism, as a category of dismissible misconduct, requires an element of racial prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism rooted in a belief of racial superiority. Where that element is absent, the label does not fit, and a dismissal premised on it will not survive scrutiny.
The ruling also carries an implicit message about how employers should respond when an employee raises a racism complaint, even in the heat of a confrontation. Immediately disciplining the accuser, without investigating the underlying grievance, carries legal risk — particularly where the accusation arises in the context of a perceived procedural injustice that may itself have substance.
For South African employers navigating the persistent intersection of race, power, and workplace discipline, the Qomoyi judgment establishes that context is not a mitigating factor to be considered after the fact. It is the primary lens through which the conduct must be assessed from the outset.