Texas is an at-will employer state. You can be fired for pretty much any reason, or more precisely, without any reason.

The 'pretty much' part is very important, though... you can fire people for no reason, but you can't fire people for protected reasons... I am not sure if firing someone for following legal social distancing orders are protected or not.

Why is that unlawful termination?

Unsafe work environment, may put the employer into OSHA compliance failures territory. Also there may be some local COVID-19 laws in place offering additional protections/mandates for employers to follow.

That said it may be difficult to prove. Employee should demand answers to their concerns about work place safety, and the employer should answer them properly. This doesn't look like it was done. The employer knee-jerkingly firing the employee the next business day after being informed the employee was not abandoning their post for no reason also doesn't look good. They knew why he was not there, and I wonder if they made any attempt to reassure or reiterate their COVID-19 safety plan, and what the expectations of staff are. If the employee was not satisfied with the answer or application of the answer, then they should file a complaint with local employment board and OSHA, and possibly speak with a lawyer if they feel they are under threat of retaliation for reporting genuine work place safety concerns.

Generally, if you email your boss and just say I'm not coming in for two weeks without discussing it with anyone before hand, you are probably going to get fired. But if what this person says is true, and they are working in cramped conditions with people who are testing positive for Covid, then something is definitely out of whack with Samsung and needs to be dealt with.

Not only that, but Samsung also informed them of covid cases on their floor via an email they could only read at work.

"By the way, your office is infected, and we didn't want to tell you this before you arrived here. Sorry not sorry."

This is criminal, and should not be excused.

Sure you can get fire, but they are framing is as voluntary resignation, meaning they are going to deny unemployment claims, which is really fucked.

Many employment agreements have a clause that says that if you fail to report to work for X days without an approved leave you're considered to have voluntarily resigned. Based on the language, I assume that's what happened here.

There is a push by senate Rebublicans to include liability protections for employers. Assuming it gets passed, then depending how it is worded, there may be no case against employers in this type of circumstance regardless of arguements over other worker protection laws.

In any first world country, it would be. In the USA...meh.

In Texas you don't need reasons to fire someone.

Just because you can fire someone for no reason doesn't mean you can fire someone for any reason.

Or to put it another way: just because you can fire someone by rolling dice doesn't mean you can fire someone for being black.

Nothing stopping you from firing someone for being black, then claiming you rolled a dice, however.

IANAL but I believe juries tend to be biased towards the plaintiff (terminated employee) in wrongful termination suits simply because there are far more low level employees in the jury pool than there are managers, not to mention how expensive it can be to litigate. Hence all the CYA measures like performance improvement plans and so on.

You can claim that you rolled dice, but that won't be sufficient - the distrimination law explicitly puts the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that the firing was because of a non-discriminatory reason, so if it's just the employer asserting that it was because of dice and the employee asserting that it was because of race, then the employer automatically loses unless they have convincing evidence to state their case.

That's part of why you'd often see lots of HR bureaucracy regarding firing process, documenting infractions, performance improvement plans, etc also in states where technically you can be fired without a reason.

Attorney here who has handled a number of similar wrongful termination claims here. You can try this, but you better have a lot of good, clear documentation backing up your non-discriminatory reason for the firing which, if you're just making it up as a pretense, you probably don't. And if it's found that you did fire for a discriminatory reason and you attempted to lie about that fact, you're opening yourself to a world of hurt.

If they make the job impossible or dangerous, it might at least count as "constructive termination", so they'd be eligible for unemployment.

True but the list of reasons that allow you to fire someone without paying unemployment is limited.

They're trying to avoid paying out unemployment by saying he failed to show up for a shift but even sans-COVID firing after one absence is abnormal.

Why would firing make someone ineligible for unemployment? That seems silly

Quitting your job makes you ineligible for unemployment -- that's why the company called it their "resignation"

Why does it matter to the company if you claim unemployment benefits?

Unemployment taxes for a company scale based on historical claims from that company. More Unemployment Benefits paid out = more future UI taxes paid by that employer. It's meant to be a self-funding system.

To expand on what phonon said -- UI tax rate is company specific and depends, in part, on how much UI is paid out to company's employees.

That sounds a nightmare of bureaucracy to calculate!

I mean, that’s how most insurance premiums work.