She moved states on certified leave. Her employer assumed she'd walked. Fair Work saw it differently
When is a worker gone for good - and when have you fired them by accident? A Fair Work Commission decision handed down on May 26, 2026 shows how easily an employer can blur that line, and how the wrong call can backfire.
Taylah Carrodus worked for Tunnelling Solutions Pty Ltd in Victoria from October 2022. On October 24, 2025, she asked to work from home full-time from January 5, 2026, tied to a planned move to Queensland. The company said no on November 14, 2025.
From there, the relationship came apart. Carrodus asked for a meeting about the refusal. The company declined and told her to respond in writing. She went on personal leave for stress on November 25, 2025 and never returned.
On December 5, 2025, she obtained a Certificate of Capacity declaring her totally unfit for work until March 4, 2026. Around the same time, she lodged a workers' compensation claim. The company had a copy of the medical certificate.
Then the dispute reached the Commission. On December 15, 2025, Tunnelling Solutions itself asked the Commission to deal with the flexible work disagreement, citing her imminent move. The matter was adjourned, with both sides due to report back by February 4, 2026.
This is where the employer made its move. On December 19, 2025, it told Carrodus through her lawyers that "absent a granted flexible work request" it would treat her as having abandoned her job as at January 5, 2026. It described the relocation to Queensland as a "unilateral" one it had not agreed to.
Carrodus moved to Queensland on December 28, 2025 and provided a further medical certificate on January 5, 2026. In early January, she noticed a payment in her account and discovered it was her final termination pay. On January 9, 2026, the company wrote to her, saying it treated her move as a "repudiation" of her employment, that the repudiation was "accepted," and that her employment was "now at an end."
Commissioner McKinnon was not persuaded. The decision found Carrodus did not abandon her job or repudiate her contract. She was on medically certified leave the company knew about. A live dispute over her work-from-home request was still on foot, with a report-back date weeks away. In those circumstances, the Commissioner found it was not open to the company to treat her absence from January 5 as a failure to attend work without notice or reasonable excuse.
The Commissioner also took apart the December 19 letter. Because it was conditional - "absent a granted flexible work request" - and because the Commission might still have granted that request, the decision found it was not clear and unequivocal notice that she would be terminated on January 5. The company, the Commissioner found, "could not reasonably have expected" her to attend work on January 5 when it knew she was certified unfit.
The upshot: Carrodus was dismissed, the dismissal took effect on January 9, 2026 - the day she was notified - and her application was filed in time.
For HR, the takeaways are blunt. Abandonment of employment is not a label you can pin on someone just because they're absent and inconvenient - least of all when they're on certified medical leave you have already seen. A conditional warning - "we'll treat you as having quit unless X" - is not the same as a clear notice of dismissal, and that condition can come back to bite you. And the date a dismissal "takes effect" may be the date you act, not the date you earlier flagged. That timing decides whether a claim falls inside the filing window. When you set the end of employment in motion, the clock and the consequences belong to you.
This decision resolved only the employer's jurisdictional objections. The Commission found Carrodus was dismissed and that her application was in time, clearing the way for her general protections claim to proceed. The substantive dispute has not yet been decided.
