Can You Fire an Employee Who Abandons Work? Yes….But….

When an employee misses work, especially for a relatively longer period of time and doesn’t tell you (the employer) why, you can fire them. That would seem obvious. Abandoning your job is basically saying you don’t want to be there.

Florida does say that if an employee disappears from work for three days in a row without telling you why, they can be considered to have abandoned their job. But you’d be surprised to learn that if you are an employer of someone who is seemingly abandoning their job, you could get in trouble for just letting them go.

Why Did the Employee Leave?

That’s because you have no idea why they have abandoned their job. Yes, nine times out of ten, it’s someone who just gives up, quits, and doesn’t have the decency to tell you. Fire them and you’re probably legally OK.

But what if that’s not what they’re doing? What if they are in the hospital, or they have a disease, illness, or disability that has gotten worse? Fire the employee in these circumstances and you could end up sued under the Americans With Disabilities Act or ADA.

Similarly, with domestic violence victims who may be out of work because they are trying to flee a bad situation, employment laws protect employees in these situations as well.

Investigating Why the Employee Left

That’s not to say that you have to track down the underlying reason why every employee misses work, but you do have to conduct some type of due diligence to locate the employee, and ascertain (within HIPAA privacy rules, of course) why the employee is not at work to protect yourself from being sued for wrongful termination.

This is why all new employees should have to give you contact information for family or emergency contacts—people who would know why the person is not at work.

You don’t have to search the ends of the earth for an employee gone AWOL. You do have to conduct some investigation, using the information and resources that you have. Make sure you document every step you took to find the employee and ascertain why he or she has left.

Paying Salary

Remember that if you do opt to terminate an employee for not coming into work, you still have an obligation to provide his or her salary on a timely basis.

Many employers will fire an employee and then wait for them to show up again and ask for their paycheck. But delaying this final payment could get you in trouble with the Fair Labor Standards Act or FLSA (this is a problem that usually can be resolved with auto payments that will provide the employee with the final paycheck automatically).

If the employee is part of the union, the collective bargaining agreement or CBA may say how long constitutes legal abandonment or it may have a process and procedure to go through, before considering a job as being abandoned.

Don’t let everyday employee problems get your business in legal trouble. Call the West Palm Beach business law attorneys at Pike & Lustig to help you with your business.

Source:

miamidade.gov/managementandbudget/library/procedures/422.pdf