Legal Question in Employment Law in California

First off, no cause is required for termination in California absent a contract that guarantees employment for a certain period of time. Otherwise an employee is at-will and can be terminated at any time for any reason other than prohibited discrimination, such as gender or race, or retaliation for protected activity, such as whistle blowing. So the only relevance of abandonment as cause for termination is whether the employee will qualify for unemployment benefits, or will be denied benefits.

Job abandonment is a subset of what the EDD refers to as "constructive voluntary quit." If an employee abandons his or her job it is the same as if they quit. If an employer fires an employee for abandonment conduct that was NOT legally abandonment, then the employee can recover benefits.

Each case in which the employer and employee dispute whether the employee abandoned the job will turn on the specific details of the situation and course of events. So there are no hard rules or laws on what is abandonment and what is termination without cause. The guidelines for EDD hearing officers only say that they should look at the following to decide if the employee constructively voluntarily quit:

The claimant voluntarily committed an act or engaged in a course of conduct which;

Left the employer no reasonable alternative but to discharge the claimant and;

The claimant knew, or reasonably should have known, the act would jeopardize his/her job and possibly result in the loss of employment.

If those criteria are met, the employee constructively voluntarily quit, unless protected by some other reason that would allow an employee to quit and still receive benefits. To give you an idea of how broad that is, a truck driver whose license was suspended for DUI of his personal vehicle was deemed to have constructively voluntarily quit. On the other hand a trucker who refused to come to work because his employer operated trucks with bald tires and refused to do anything about it, might have protection.

Bottom line: it turns on the facts and details of each case.