A handbook, a missed deadline, and a firing that came too soon – here's what went wrong
When you set a deadline in writing and then fire someone before it arrives, your own paperwork can undo you. A Hawaiʻi tour company just found that out.
On June 4, 2026, the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi ruled that Tachibana Enterprises failed to prove that a fired tour guide committed "misconduct" under state law – the legal threshold that allows an employer to block a terminated worker's unemployment benefits.
Tachibana hired Hye Ja Choi in 2016 as a part-time airport guide escorting Japanese-speaking tourists to Waikīkī locations by bus. In late 2019, the company revised its employee handbook and directed all employees to sign an acknowledgment. The stated deadline was January 31, 2020. But the assistant manager responsible for notifying the Japanese-speaking guides did not send the request until February 7, 2020 – after the deadline had already passed. She testified the email went out late because she was so busy at the time.
Choi did not sign. She said she did not understand the handbook's at-will clause – the provision allowing the employer to end the job at any time without cause – and wanted a meeting to have it explained. The handbook itself told employees to ask a supervisor about anything unclear, which is what she did.
On March 16, 2020, Choi received her first written warning, citing her failure to sign the acknowledgment. It gave her until April 14, 2020 to comply and told her, for the first time, that failure to sign by that date could result in termination. Then, on March 30, 2020, the company fired her – roughly two weeks before that deadline, with no further warning.
That gap was the company's biggest problem. The court found Tachibana terminated Choi before its own corrective deadline expired, without following its progressive discipline policy. The court also found the warning misstated the record by faulting Choi for missing a January 31 deadline that the company's own assistant manager had not communicated to the guides until after it had passed.
Two customer service incidents did not save the employer's case either. On February 17, 2020, Choi attempted to direct a regularly ticketed family with a baby through a TSA gold lane. On February 20, she raised her voice at airline staff while trying to speed up seat changes for her tour group. The court found neither incident showed the willful or wanton disregard of the employer's interests that the misconduct standard requires.
A documentation gap compounded the problem. Both February incidents appeared in the termination notice but were absent from the March 16 written warning, which cited only the unsigned acknowledgment. The company also produced no evidence of any violations after the warning was issued.
Hawaiʻi's unemployment law places the burden of proving misconduct on the employer. Tachibana did not meet it.
The practical lessons for HR teams are straightforward. Set corrective deadlines that you intend to honor and can defend on the record. Document each specific reason in every warning, not just in the termination notice. Make sure policy directives actually reach the employees they are directed at, in a language they can understand. And never terminate before a corrective window you put in writing has closed.
The court reversed the lower decisions and sent the case back to the state labor department to determine the unemployment benefits Choi is owed.
