She sent nine work emails to Gmail — then lost her job

Cape Town – A former National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) accountant who was dismissed after forwarding nine work emails to her personal Gmail account will have to face a fresh arbitration after the Labour Court overturned a ruling that had found her dismissal unfair.

According to MyBroadband, the dispute involves Zenobia Abrahams, a long-serving NSFAS employee who was dismissed in September 2023 after being found guilty of intentionally disclosing privileged and confidential information.

IOL reported that Abrahams had worked for NSFAS since November 2006 and, between March and October 2022, forwarded nine emails containing NSFAS information to her personal Gmail account while working as an Accountant: Budgeting and Expenditure.

NSFAS said the conduct breached its Information Security Policy, which prohibits employees from forwarding work-related emails to personal accounts, as well as its ICT Security Management and Acceptable Use Policy.

Written warning 

Abrahams challenged her dismissal at the CCMA. In April 2025, commissioner C.M. Bennett found the dismissal substantively unfair, ruling that the misconduct amounted to a less serious breach and that a final written warning would have been appropriate.

She was ordered to be reinstated with back pay of more than R1 million, calculated at 20 months’ remuneration of R52,250 a month, according to IOL.

NSFAS then approached the Labour Court to review the CCMA decision.

Acting Judge C. de Kock found that the commissioner had misunderstood the nature of the disciplinary charge. The issue was not necessarily whether Abrahams had subsequently disclosed the information to an outside party or whether NSFAS could prove actual harm, but whether she had “unauthorised” removed confidential information from NSFAS’s controlled systems by sending it to her personal email account.

The court also stressed the sensitivity of the information involved. NSFAS handles personal and financial information relating to tens of thousands of students, and the judge found that the organisation was entitled to prohibit employees from transferring confidential material to platforms outside its control.

Fresh arbitration

However, the Labour Court stopped short of deciding that Abrahams’s dismissal was fair.

Instead, it set aside the CCMA award and referred the dispute back to the CCMA for a fresh arbitration before a different commissioner. The new hearing will consider Abrahams’s explanations, credibility, the appropriate classification of her conduct and the correct sanction.

The court specifically noted that the fresh arbitration could still conclude that dismissal was justified or that it was too harsh.

The case also highlights the legal distinction between an employee’s personal email privacy and an employer’s right to protect confidential business information. BusinessTech previously reported that South African employers’ monitoring of employee communications is regulated by the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (RICA), with employers expected to make employees aware of relevant monitoring policies.

The latest Labour Court ruling therefore does not mean Abrahams has definitively lost her case. Rather, the court has ordered that the dispute be reconsidered by the CCMA after finding that the original arbitration contained material errors in assessing the misconduct and sanction.