Complainants Abandoned Their Employment By.docx

Complainants abandoned their employment by failing to report for work or having gone AWOL Abandonment is the deliberate and unjustified refusal of an employee to resume his employment. To constitute abandonment of work, two elements must concur: (1) the employee must have failed to report for work or must have been absent without valid or justifiable reason; and (2) there must have been a clear intention on the part of the employee to sever the employeremployee relationship manifested by some overt act. Abandonment is a matter of intention and cannot lightly be inferred or legally presumed from certain equivocal acts.30 For abandonment to be appreciated, there must be a "clear, willful, deliberate, and unjustified refusal of the employee to resume employment." 31

Further, the employee’s deliberate and unjustified refusal to resume his employment without any intention of returning should be established and proven by the employer.[32] It is a settled rule that failure to report for work after a notice to return to work has been served does not necessarily constitute abandonment. As defined under established jurisprudence, abandonment is the deliberate and unjustified refusal of an employee to resume his employment. It is a form of neglect of duty, hence, a just cause for termination of employment by the employer. For a valid finding of abandonment, these two factors should be present: (1) the failure to report for work or absence without valid or justifiable reason; and (2) a clear intention to sever employer-employee relationship, with the second as the more determinative factor which is manifested by overt acts from which it may be deduced that the employee has no more intention to work 19

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There must be a concurrence of the intention to abandon and some overt acts from which an employee may be deduced as having no more intention to work. 30

Camua, Jr., v, NLRC, 541 Phil. 650, 657 (2007).

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La Rosa v. Ambassador Hotel, G.R. No. 177059, 13 March 2009, 581 SCRA 340, 347