most employment in the US is "at will" and has no real contractual obligations. you can quit at any time (and be fired at any time), for any reason. severance is essentially a benefit, completely optional, although it is required by law in some mass layoff situations regardless of at-will employment.
You are misunderstanding me. I'm writing about an employer telling employees that an specific action (not showing up) will count as a resignation. It seems so weird to me that this isn't in the contract.
If you were my employee and I said you had a shift at say 8am and you never showed up then I'd just fire you _with cause_. There's no need for it to count as a resignation.
The point is that being terminated, as opposed to resigning, has implications for unemployment and other benefits. It therefore matters if an employer is free to simply interpret an arbitrary action or non-action as resignation.
A better interpretation of unemployment insurance is you are no longer able to work through no fault of your own. That varies a little between states, but most places you are able to quit for cause and collect UI. A few examples is if your pay significantly drops, or your job duties change significantly, or your place of employment moves to an unreasonable commute. The flip is also true, you may be ineligible for UI if you're fired for cause. Quitting vs resigning isn't a direct correlation to collecting UI, though they often rhyme for general cases.
I don't think UI really cares about resigned vs quit.
Looking at Texas's site [1], they explicitly say if your employer asks for a resignation it counts as being fired. There are also a bunch of ways for quitting to be eligible (i.e. "Significant changes in hiring agreement").
UI cares whether you resign voluntarily, vs your employer demands that you no longer work there. Tesla is trying to get employees to say "I quit", meaning they forfeit their rights. OP needs to get Tesla to say "You are no longer employed".
