"Fired for attendance" is not the legal question
Attendance is one of the most common reasons employers give for a firing, and one of the most common things DEED writes on a Determination of Ineligibility. But "fired for attendance" is not a legal category, and it does not decide your claim. Under Minn. Stat. § 268.095, subd. 4, a worker who is discharged is eligible for benefits unless the discharge was for employment misconduct, which subd. 6(a) defines as "intentional, negligent, or indifferent conduct, on the job or off the job, that is a serious violation of the standards of behavior the employer has the right to reasonably expect of the employee." That definition is exclusive — subd. 6(e) says "no other definition applies" — and the Minnesota Supreme Court has been explicit that attendance cases are not decided by a formula: "Whether an employee's absenteeism and tardiness amounts to a serious violation of the standards of behavior an employer has a right to expect depends on the circumstances of each case." Stagg v. Vintage Place Inc., 796 N.W.2d 312, 316 (Minn. 2011). So the question at your hearing is never "how many times were you late?" It is why you were absent, what you told your employer and when, and whether the policy you broke was one the employer could reasonably enforce.
When absences and tardiness are employment misconduct
Start with the cases employers win, because they follow a pattern. An employer has the right to set a reasonable attendance and call-in policy and to enforce it, and "[a]s a general rule, refusing to abide by an employer's reasonable policies and requests amounts to disqualifying misconduct." Schmidgall v. FilmTec Corp., 644 N.W.2d 801, 804 (Minn. 2002). Repeated, unexplained violations after warnings are the clearest example: in Evenson v. Omnetic's, 344 N.W.2d 881, 883 (Minn. App. 1984), an employee who was late three times and took long lunches four times in a month, after oral and written warnings, was disqualified; in Stagg, an employee who missed or was late to at least five shifts in violation of a known two-hour call-in rule — including calling in sick after his shift had started — was disqualified even though the employer skipped a step in its own progressive-discipline schedule, because "the focus of the inquiry is the employee's conduct, not that of the employer." 796 N.W.2d at 316. The no-call/no-show is treated most harshly of all. The Court of Appeals has said that "except in certain limited circumstances, an employee engages in misconduct if he is absent even once without notifying his employer," Del Dee Foods, Inc. v. Miller, 390 N.W.2d 415, 418 (Minn. App. 1986), and in Cunningham v. Wal-Mart Associates, Inc., 809 N.W.2d 231, 235 (Minn. App. 2011), five consecutive shifts missed without a call was "a serious violation of the standard that Wal-Mart had a right to reasonably expect of its employees." If your record looks like that — warnings, a written policy, and absences you cannot explain — you should know going in that the law is against you, and your hearing preparation needs to be honest about it.
When they aren't: illness, family care, and the other statutory exclusions
Now the other side, which is where most real attendance cases actually live. The statute itself lists things that are not misconduct no matter what the employer's policy says, and three of them are about attendance. Subd. 6(b)(7) excludes "absence because of illness or injury of the applicant, with proper notice to the employer." Subd. 6(b)(8) excludes "absence, with proper notice to the employer, in order to provide necessary care because of the illness, injury, or disability of an immediate family member." And subd. 6(b)(1) excludes "conduct that was a consequence of the applicant's mental illness or impairment" — which is how the employee in Cunningham ultimately won: his five no-call absences were a consequence of a cognitive impairment his employer knew about, so they were not misconduct. 809 N.W.2d at 236. The Court of Appeals stated the illness rule plainly in Wichmann v. Travalia & U.S. Directives, Inc., 729 N.W.2d 23, 28 (Minn. App. 2007): "When an employee is absent from work because of illness and gives the employer proper notice, the absence is not employment misconduct." Two more provisions do quiet work in these cases. Subd. 6(b)(4) excludes "conduct an average reasonable employee would have engaged in under the circumstances" — the basis on which the court held in Hanson v. Crestliner Inc., 772 N.W.2d 539, 543–44 (Minn. App. 2009), that an employee who missed work without any notice because his mother had been unexpectedly hospitalized had not committed misconduct. And subd. 6(d) says that if you were fired for "only a single incident, that is an important fact that must be considered." The Supreme Court has applied the same objective, circumstances-driven approach even to an absence caused by a jail sentence: in Jenkins v. American Express Financial Corp., 721 N.W.2d 286, 290–93 (Minn. 2006), an employee on work-release who missed six days because her employer never returned the verification call it had promised to make was found eligible, because her employer's expectation was unreasonable under the circumstances and she had done everything within her power to get to work. Child-care absences are judged the same way — older decisions such as Prickett v. Circuit Science, Inc., 518 N.W.2d 602, 605–06 (Minn. 1994), and McCourtney v. Imprimis Technology, Inc., 465 N.W.2d 721, 724–25 (Minn. App. 1991), found no misconduct where the worker made good-faith efforts to find care and kept the employer informed, and although they were decided under an older definition, Hanson treats them as still instructive.
"Proper notice" — where attendance cases are won and lost
Notice the word that appears in both statutory exclusions: proper notice. That phrase is where attendance cases are won and lost, and no published Minnesota appellate decision defines it, so the judge will look at your employer's rule and what you actually did. Wichmann confirms that "[a]n employer has the right to establish and enforce reasonable rules governing absences from work," 729 N.W.2d at 28, so if the handbook says call the manager two hours before your shift, a text to a coworker ten minutes after it started is a weak position, even if you were genuinely sick. The obligation is notice, not finding your own replacement — Wichmann turned on the finding that the employee gave no notice at all — but you do have to give that notice in the way the employer reasonably asked for it. If notice was impossible because of an emergency, say so and explain why; that is Hanson. Three other things claimants often get wrong: a doctor's note helps but is not required by the statute; the employer's label ("job abandonment," "no-call/no-show," "policy violation") is not evidence of anything, since the judge decides what your conduct was; and the employer's failure to follow its own discipline policy does not help you, per Stagg. What does help you is a record — the written policy, your call-in log, phone records, texts, emails, medical or school paperwork, and the names of the people you told.
Denied for attendance? What to do next
If you have been denied, first calendar your 45-day appeal deadline and file the appeal; you can build the case afterward. Then go through every absence the employer relied on, one at a time, and sort each into a category: illness with notice, family care with notice, an emergency where notice was impossible, or something you cannot excuse. Be candid about the last group — a judge who sees you own two unexcused absences will believe you about the eight that were excused. Your job at the hearing is to show that the absences the employer is actually counting fall inside the statutory exclusions, or that under all the circumstances they were not a serious violation of a reasonable expectation. Our guide to Minnesota's employment misconduct standard covers the broader definition and the other things the statute says are not misconduct, and how to appeal a Minnesota unemployment denial walks through the hearing itself. If you would like an attorney to organize those absences into a hearing plan for you, that is exactly what the Self-Representation Packet is for.
The misconduct definition in Minn. Stat. § 268.095, subd. 6 was amended in 2019; older cases quote earlier wording, but the holdings described here remain good law as of the "last reviewed" date above.
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