A Water Industry Worker who vanished from contact for weeks, prompting his employer to call police for a welfare check, has failed in his bid to bring a general protections claim, after the Fair Work Commission found he had abandoned his job rather than being dismissed.
What the Commission decided
Riki Dahm worked for Central Seq Distributor-Retailer Authority, trading as Urban Utilities, from January 2020. After a period of approved annual leave ending on 31 October 2025, he did not return to work and made no contact with his employer. Urban Utilities kept paying him regardless and later granted him further paid leave, including a stretch of discretionary leave once staff became worried about his welfare.
With no word from Mr Dahm or his emergency contacts, Urban Utilities asked Queensland Police to check on him at home. Police attended, but the company still could not confirm he was safe. Mr Dahm later sent a mass email to company executives, board members and politicians, which the Commissioner found gave no indication of when, or whether, he intended to return to work.
Urban Utilities wrote to him twice warning that his ongoing silence would be treated as abandonment of his job, and gave him detailed information about his available leave balances and a deadline to respond. When he still did not respond, the company terminated his employment on 23 January 2026 and paid out his notice and other entitlements.
Commissioner Durham found that Urban Utilities had not acted with any intention of ending Mr Dahm's employment. Instead, the company's actions were aimed at giving him every chance to clarify his intentions. The Commissioner concluded that it was Mr Dahm's own conduct, not any decision by the employer, that brought the employment relationship to an end.
What was actually in dispute
The case turned on whether Mr Dahm had been dismissed at all, a threshold question the Commission must resolve before a general protections dispute involving dismissal can proceed. Urban Utilities argued Mr Dahm had abandoned his job, which in law amounts to a renunciation of the employment contract, rather than the employer terminating him.
The Commissioner relied on a Full Bench decision describing abandonment as conduct that would convey to a reasonable employer that the employee no longer intended to be bound by their job, even though it is technically the employer's later letter that formally ends things. Applying that reasoning, the Commissioner found Mr Dahm's prolonged, unexplained absence and failure to respond to repeated contact met that description. Because the employment relationship was ended by his own conduct rather than at the employer's initiative, there was no dismissal for the purposes of the Act.
The parties had agreed on the facts, so the matter was decided on the papers without a hearing, with the dispute confined to how those facts should be characterised in law.
What this means
The decision was dismissed for want of jurisdiction, meaning Mr Dahm's general protections claim could not proceed any further. The case illustrates how the Commission approaches disputes over whether someone was dismissed at all, an issue covered more broadly at unfair dismissal vs general protections, and the related question of when an extended, unexplained absence is treated as abandonment of employment rather than a termination initiated by the employer.