Disciplinary hearings & the CCMA
A notice arrives, or a dismissal does, and the process is already moving without you. Tinman does not tell you what to do. It works out what the rules say about your situation, and hands you your dates, your documents and the questions you will be asked.
Rules computed, not guessed. Tinman narrates what they produce. General information, not legal advice about your matter.
Why we built this
We know. It is free, it is open in another tab, and at two in the morning before a hearing it is the only thing that answers. Nobody is going to tell you not to. We would rather tell you what it is doing when it answers you.
At VCB-AI we champion employee rights to the fullest. That starts with not handing someone a wrong date on the worst week of their working life.
What the testing shows
We have put the leading general models through South African labour questions ourselves, and the published research says the same thing at a larger scale. A general-purpose assistant asked a legal question invents its answer somewhere between half and most of the time.
How often leading general-purpose assistants hallucinated on legal questions, with no legal database behind them.
The expensive legal research assistants the big firms buy, the ones sold as grounded in real case law, still hallucinated on up to a third of queries.
Ask again an hour later and the answer changes. A deadline is not a matter of opinion, but to a language model it is just a likely-looking number.
They do not calculate, they write out what a calculation tends to look like. Counting thirty days across weekends and public holidays is exactly the kind of thing they get quietly wrong.
Read the second one again. Those are not consumer toys, they are the tools sold to the largest firms in the world, marketed at one point as delivering citations that were free of invention altogether. An independent, preregistered study measured them and found otherwise, and the claim was quietly withdrawn.
Two kinds of wrong come out of these systems. The obvious one states the law incorrectly. The dangerous one states it correctly and cites a source that does not say it, which survives a quick check by anyone who does not open the authority and read it. On a date you cannot afford to miss, neither is survivable.
Figures for the purpose-built tools and for general models on legal queries: Magesh, Surani, Dahl, Suzgun, Manning and Ho, Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools, Stanford RegLab and HAI, preregistered, published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2025. We do not name the products; the study does.
So we did it the other way round
We built our own technology to synthesise South African labour law into deterministic rules: the periods, the triggers, the steps, each one turned into something a machine executes the same way every time. Those rules produce the answer. Tinman's only job is to put it into a sentence you can use.
That is the whole difference. A chatbot asked about a deadline is guessing at a plausible number. Here the date is computed from the statute and the model is not permitted to touch it. Same facts, same answer, every time, with the section it came from.
What you get
Tinman will not tell you whether to fight, settle or walk away. Those are yours, and often a labour professional's. What it does is make sure you arrive knowing things nobody usually tells you.
Computed
Give it what happened and when. The rules work out which period applies to you, what it counts from, and the day it runs out.
Assembled
Which documents matter for the kind of matter you have, and which of them only your employer holds, so you ask before you need them.
Rehearsed
What a chairperson or a commissioner typically puts to someone in your position, so the first time you hear it is not in the room.
The part that expires
A referral that arrives late is not heard on whether you were treated fairly. It is heard on why it was late. These are the periods the Labour Relations Act sets, as the CCMA states them, and they are the rules Tinman computes your own dates from.
From the date of dismissal. If you ran an internal appeal, from the date of that outcome.
Suspension, demotion, promotion, training, benefits. From the act, or from when you became aware of it.
Under the Employment Equity Act, from the act or omission you say was discriminatory.
After the certificate of outcome is issued, or after the thirty-day conciliation period ends.
How the days are counted. Every day counts, weekends and public holidays included. You exclude the first day and include the last. Dismissed on 6 August, counting starts on 7 August, and the last day to refer is 5 September. Most people lose time assuming it is working days.
Already past one of these? The way back is called condonation, and it is decided on good cause shown. The application has to account for how late you are, why, what steps you took, why the case has prospects, and what the delay costs the other side. Tinman works out how many days late you are and what the application has to cover.
Before the room
Whatever is said, shown and written down becomes the thing a commissioner reads months later. Walking in prepared is not about being clever. It is about arriving with your dates, your documents and your version already in order.
What a fair process requires
Tinman checks each of these against what you tell it happened, and says which ones your matter turns on.
Before
The charge in writing, and enough time to prepare an answer to it.
During
A representative, usually a fellow employee or a shop steward. To see the evidence and question it. To state your side before a decision is taken. An interpreter if you would rather not use English.
After
The decision, and what it was based on, so that an appeal or a referral has something to answer.
Free, and staffed by people
None of this costs anything. The CCMA runs a national call centre and its Case Management Officers help people complete referrals at no charge.
Nobody should charge you to fill in a form. The CCMA warns about operators outside its offices who present themselves as lawyers or staff and charge for referral forms that are free. Its own Case Management Officers do it at no cost. If someone asks you for money to refer a dispute, that is the fraud hotline above.
Two things the CCMA does not handle: pay below the national minimum wage, which goes to a labour centre of the Department of Employment and Labour, and injuries at work, which go to the Compensation Fund. Matters inside a bargaining council's jurisdiction go to that council instead.
After the outcome
You do not need the employer to agree, and you do not need a lawyer to start. What you need is the form, proof that the other side received it, and to be inside the date.
Form 7.11. Complete it, deliver a copy to the employer, and send the CCMA the form together with proof that you served it. Email is acceptable.
Nothing to refer. The CCMA does not charge the parties to conciliate or arbitrate a dispute.
A commissioner tries to settle it with both sides. If it does not settle, a certificate is issued and the matter can go on to arbitration.
Allowed in conciliation and arbitration, with exceptions under CCMA Rule 25. Dismissals for misconduct or incapacity, and claims for money under the National Minimum Wage Act, are among the matters where it is limited.
Matters inside a bargaining council's jurisdiction go there instead, and some disputes sit with the Labour Court. Independent contractors fall outside this system.
0861 161616, or ccma.org.za. They are the ones who decide, and their own information sheets are free to read.
Deterministic rules, narrated
Tell it what happened and when. The rules compute which period applies to you, what it counts from and the day it runs out; Tinman puts that into a sentence, with the section it came from. It will not tell you what to do with it. That part stays yours.
Tinman@LabourLaw