[wa] “voluntary Job Abandonment” Because I Modified My Linked In Profile?

Location: Washington State

I have worked at a medium sized organization for around five years. To be completely honest, it has always been a toxic environment, but I have stayed because being in this location geographically has been important to me for familial and personal reasons.

Recently I have been, admittedly, been considering leaving. There is a variety of reasons, but one of the primary reasons is that our long time director recently retired. A new director was hired, and the transition has been incredibly bumpy and made what was a somewhat toxic environment even worse. Many of my personal reasons for staying in this area have also resolved themselves.

Around a week ago, after a particularly rough day at the office, I was struggling to go to sleep and fiddling on my phone, and found myself on LinkedIn (which I do not use often), and ended up changing my profile to indicate that I no longer worked for my current employer. I should note that while I actually do not have any connections from this job, the new director had invited basically the entire organization to connect on LinkedIn shortly before this, however I specifically did not accept this invitation. I proceeded to forget I made this change, and didn’t reopen LinkedIn again until late yesterday.

On Friday, the director scheduled a meeting with me and my supervisor yesterday. I didn’t really think much of it, as he has actually been meeting one on one with individual staff, often with their direct supervisor, so I just assumed it was my turn.

When I get into the meeting, both my supervisor and our HR rep were present, which was my first warning this was something different. There are no pleasantries, and the new director immediately explains that he couldn’t help but notice that I had “voluntarily abandoned” my position on LinkedIn, and that he was going to have to ask me to stop showing up at the office as I had chosen to resign. He expressed disappointment that I had decided to resign, and indicated that he was, “working with legal” to figure out whether legally they could pay me for the hours I had worked after tendering my resignation on LinkedIn.

I was, to put it lightly, quite surprised. I had shown up on time for each of my shifts since changing my linked in profile, had not spoken to anybody about intending to resign, and honestly thought my LinkedIn profile had been set up in such a way my job history was private except for confirmed connections. My supervisor and the HR rep also seemed a bit confused, with the HR rep specifically asking the director whether there might have been a mistake and whether he had any written notice of my resignation, which he responded to by pulling out his phone and showing her my LinkedIn profile.

To be honest, I really don’t know if I want to take this anywhere, as explained above this was a toxic environment and the reasons I stayed were pretty quickly eroding to begin with, but it seems odd that making a modification to a third party application could constitute job abandonment when I otherwise reported to work and continued to do my job without providing any further notice of my intentions to terminate my employment.