Employment Brief: legal implications of live-quitting and employee ghosting in Hungary

Live-quitting (or Quit-Tok¹) and employee ghosting² continue to gain traction among employees in Hungary. The termination of employment is often a stressful situation for employees, which prompts them to find alternative ways of ending their employment relationship. However, these atypical termination practices can yield several unintended legal implications under local laws.

Legal implications

In cases of both live-quitting and employee ghosting the employee does not communicate her or his resignation in a way that is deemed acceptable by the national law. Terminating verbally or via videos on social media constitutes a wrongful termination, given that the Hungarian Labour Code requires a termination notice in writing. A termination can be also regarded as wrongful when the employee simply becomes unavailable to the employer without any further notification. 

If an employee, either after streaming a resignation video or without giving any notice fails to appear at the workplace and complete their work-related duties for the duration of notice period and refuses to fulfil their handover and settlement obligations in accordance with the employment termination, he or she can be subject to all applicable consequences related to wrongful termination. 

In such cases, the employer may either:

i.) claim the salary due to an employee for the notice period as a lump-sum for damages (the employer is not obligated to claim said damages), or 

ii.) simply take the steps prescribed by law to end the employment relationship, in which case the termination will be considered to be based on the parties’ mutual agreement. 

1. Live-quitting broadly means any form of termination communicated verbally while it is recorded and distributed through social media platforms by the employee. Another name for this phenomenon is Quit-Tok, which is derived from the name of the renowned video-sharing platform (TikTok) and the English verb “quit”.  ↩︎
2. Employee ghosting refers to the abrupt cessation of work without any prior notice, resulting in the employee’s sudden unavailability and absence from work(place) without any formal termination. ↩︎