He told one manager he would never return, then asked another for more shifts
A casual worker quit one hotel, asked for more shifts at another - and the Fair Work Commission ruled he had been dismissed.
When a casual hospitality worker texted his manager to cancel his shifts and said he would not return, his employer treated it as a resignation. The Fair Work Commission disagreed - and the difference now exposes the company to a general protections claim.
In a decision handed down on June 3, 2026, Commissioner Matheson found that Cristian Letelier had been dismissed by Redcape Hotel Group, rather than having resigned. The ruling turned on a detail many managers would have missed.
Letelier worked about 30 hours a week at the Lakeview Hotel Motel. In the two months before the dispute, he also picked up at least one shift a week at the company's Figtree Hotel, helping cover gaps there.
On February 20, 2026, the decision records that he was the subject of inappropriate behaviour by a customer at the Lakeview. The hotel asked the customer to leave that day and later imposed a temporary exclusion, and management said the customer apologised. The employer also contended that Letelier had contributed to the escalation. Either way, he was unhappy with how it was handled.
On February 23, he called the Figtree manager, Mitchell Wyllie, said he was resigning from the Lakeview over the incident, and asked for more shifts at the Figtree. Wyllie replied, "leave it with me." Letelier then texted the Lakeview venue manager: "Please cancel my shifts at the Lakeview on Humanforce. I will not return."
Two days later, Wyllie called to tell Letelier he was no longer employed - that he had "let the team down" by resigning without adequate notice.
Redcape argued there had been no dismissal at all. Letelier's contract based him at the Lakeview, it said; the Figtree shifts were informal extras, and by abandoning his contracted venue he had resigned. The February 25 call, on that view, merely confirmed an employment relationship he had already ended himself.
The Commissioner rejected that framing. The legal test is not what either party privately intended, but what a reasonable person in their position would have understood from the words and conduct. Here, the conduct pointed away from resignation. The decision found that Letelier "wanted the employment relationship to continue but with different arrangements" - working only at the Figtree Hotel - and that his request for more shifts there made the intention clear to the employer.
Matheson also weighed whether Letelier had repudiated his contract by refusing to return to his base venue. She found that arguable but not certain, noting repudiation "is a serious matter that is not to be lightly found or inferred" and that the parties' submissions had not squarely addressed it. As a casual already working a second site, his refusal to return to one location did not clearly signal walking away from the whole business.
The conclusion: the relationship survived the February 23 messages and ended only with Wyllie's February 25 call - a termination on the employer's initiative, and a dismissal under section 386(1)(a) of the Fair Work Act. The jurisdictional objection was dismissed.
For HR leaders, the takeaways are concrete. A resignation must be clear and unambiguous, and it is judged objectively - not by whatever reading a manager finds convenient. A casual who steps back from one site while chasing work at another has not necessarily quit. And treating a murky "I won't return to this venue" as a clean resignation, then ending the worker's employment for failing to give notice, can convert the whole thing into an employer-initiated dismissal - and an avenue for a general protections claim.
The decision settled only whether a dismissal occurred. The Commission has not ruled on the merits of Letelier's general protections claim, which now moves to a conciliation conference.
