An employee who did not return to work after receipt of prior notice of termination is not deemed as resigning

A foreign employee from Thailand worked at a restaurant with a work visa. When the visa expired, the restaurant bought him a flight ticket to Thailand but the employee did not board the flight, remained illegally in Israel but did not return to the restaurant. While the employer contended that in doing so, the employee abandoned the workplace and resigned, the employee demanded severance pay from both the company and the shareholders.
The Court held that the employee is entitled to severance pay, but the company’s shareholder is not personally liable. The question of whether an employee resigned or was terminated is examined by the behavior of the parties, including the question of who initiated the termination of the relationship and who was willing to continue such. Here, the restaurant informed the employee that his stay permit expired and even bought him a flight ticket and therefore had to make completion of accounts and pay for severance. The fact that the employee did not board his flight, but also did not return to work in the restaurant without the visa, does not constitute abandonment because the employer informed him about the termination of employment before that. An employee has a special status that facilitates attribution of debts to employees by a company, to its shareholders, but failure to pay an employee does not by itself constitute grounds for ignoring the corporate veil that separates between the shareholder and the company. In order to ignore the corporate veil, serious acts are required, such as fraud or usurping the corporate veil to avoid payment. Here, no such actions have been done and therefore there is no cause for personal liability of the shareholder.