No such thing as 'conditional resignation'

Dr Daphne Loke Thursday, 17 December 2009 08:11

COMMENT Resignation from any position, whether it is by way of employment or appointment is a means for an action of voluntary separation from the organisation, or business entity. In the case of the 13 MCA Central Committee members, I would like to analyse the issue as follows:- First, what is the procedure of resignation of CC members provided in the party constitution? I did a pdf search on the party constitution for the term “conditional resignation”. The result was zero. Organisations such as some agencies under the United Nations specifically states inside the Employment Handbook:- “Conditional Resignations will not be accepted. Any conditional resignation will be returned to the employee.” With others, conditional resignations are acceptable provided they follow prescribed procedures for achieving the stated objectives for which they were granted. By the recent media announcements, the MCA secretary-general Wong Foon Meng had formulated a prescribed format for these resignations and they were for the purpose of effecting a re-election of the CC. The crucial question to ask here is whether the resignations were made on these prescribed formats, or did the 13 CC members designed their own format? Rejected in the US Next, I would like to look at how governments look at conditional resignations. Canadian Service categorically spelt out that condition resignation is a resignation IF stated conditions were accepted. The employer is not entitled to accept just the resignation and reject the conditions. In short, the act of resignation and the conditions cannot be treated as separated. The US outright rejects a conditional resignation as a form of resignation. A lawyer of the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York said, “…a forced resignation is not a valid resignation, and when it is conditional, it is even less of a resignation”. The UK industrial law authorities look at it differently. In a 2001 Employment Appeal Tribunal case, the employee submitted to his employers a resignation letter conditional that the employer were to halt ongoing disciplinary proceedings against him as well as to pay him compensation for loss of office (the job) to be detailed in a compromise agreement to be effected a few days later. His employer officially accepted his resignation the same day. When dispute over the compromise agreement arose, the employee brought a case of unfair dismissal against the employer. At the Employment Appeal Tribunal presided by a QC and two other judges, it was decided that the employee’s resignation took effect as soon as the employer accepted it and that the employee was not coerced in into submitting his resignation. No resignation at all Worthy to note is the argument that the employee’s resignation, albeit worded as “conditional”, was a condition precedent for the employer to halt disciplinary proceedings against him. In line with US authority, conditional resignation is no resignation at all. The cited Canadian law cannot be applied here as the condition (re-election) is remote and not within the control of the 13 CC members. Today, UK case law still has considerable influence in the Malaysian courts. Taking this line of thought, we need to examine the sequence of events : the resignations come first or the re-election? I tend to agree with the above UK case that the resignations of the 13 CC members is a condition precedent to the re-election. Therefore, when with pomp and fanfare, the 13 CC members handed over their conditional resignations over to the secretary-general of MCA at the Parliament House Tuesday morning, and the sec-gen had signed acceptance of those resignations, the MCA Central Committee should officially endorse acceptance of their resignations. This I recommend. Dr Daphne Loke holds an MBA with Specialisation in Human Resource Management and is a senior lecturer for HRM at Masters level.