Treat it as an absence you have to investigate rather than a resignation: the Restaurant Industry Award contains no abandonment of employment clause at all, so ending the job after 3 unanswered calls is a dismissal under section 386 of the Fair Work Act.
Skai Solutions checked the award text for this one rather than repeating the folklore, and the folklore does not survive it. Below: what covering the shift really costs at award overtime rates, why the three day rule does not exist, four fixes ordered by what they cost you, and what has to happen before you can defensibly end the employment.
Not the wage you did not pay. The cost is what you spend covering the hole, and in a kitchen or on a floor at 6pm there are only three ways to cover it: send someone home late, call someone in, or run short.
Sending someone home late is the expensive one, and the award makes it more expensive than most operators expect. Overtime under Table 7 of clause 23.4 of the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 runs at 150% of the minimum hourly rate for the first two hours Monday to Friday and 200% after that, 175% then 200% on a Saturday, and 200% for every hour on a Sunday. Clause 24.3 says where more than one penalty could apply only the higher is paid, so you do not stack a Sunday penalty on top, but 200% is already the ceiling.
Then two clauses that keep running after service ends. Clause 16.8: more than two hours of overtime after rostered hours earns an additional 20 minute paid rest break. Clause 23.2: if the employee's next rostered start is less than eight hours after the overtime finished, they may start later without loss of pay, and if they do not get that eight hour break the overtime rate continues until they do. A Friday no show covered by a double shift can therefore reach into Saturday's wage bill. Our page on hospitality award overtime works through both clauses in detail.
Running short has a cost too, it is just harder to see: the calls nobody answers, the walk ins nobody greets, the tables that turn slower. That one is worth measuring before you accept it as the cheap option.
Almost every operator has heard some version of it: no contact for three days and the person has abandoned their employment, so you can take them off the roster and off the books.
We checked. The consolidated text of the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 as published at awards.fairwork.gov.au contains the word "abandon" zero times. Not in a clause, not in a note, not in a schedule. There is no abandonment of employment provision in the award at all, so there is no three day rule in it to rely on.
What there is instead is section 386 of the Fair Work Act 2009. Read through the Act, a person "has been dismissed if" their "employment with his or her employer has been terminated on the employer's initiative". Taking somebody off the roster permanently and treating the job as over is your initiative, whatever prompted it. It is a dismissal, and it gets judged as one.
That matters because of who can challenge it. An employee can bring an unfair dismissal claim once they have served the minimum employment period, which is six months, or twelve months where the employer is a small business employer with fewer than 15 employees. A casual with a regular and systematic pattern of work can accrue that service too. So "they were only a casual" is not the protection it sounds like.
In order of what they cost you, not in order of how satisfying they are.
What none of these do is get the phone answered while you are short handed. That is the part of a no show that follows you around for the whole service. A Skai Solutions AI phone agent picks up every call, takes the booking into your system and is live in five days, so being one body down stops meaning missed bookings as well.
There is no day count that makes it safe, and that is the honest answer. What makes it defensible is a process you can show.
Section 387 of the Fair Work Act sets out what the Fair Work Commission must take into account in deciding whether a dismissal was harsh, unjust or unreasonable. The criteria in that section are about whether there was a valid reason, whether the person was notified of it, whether they had a chance to respond, and whether they were allowed a support person. Every one of those is something you either did or did not do before you decided, and none of them is satisfied by the passage of time.
So the practical sequence is: contact, written notice of the concern, a real chance to explain, and only then a decision. If you employ fewer than 15 people the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code is relevant to you and following it has a specific protective effect, which is a reason to read it rather than a reason to skip the steps above.
One separate point on money, because people conflate the two. A resignation without notice is a different situation and the award does deal with that one: clause 35.1(d) lets an employer deduct no more than one week's wages where an employee aged at least 18 who was required to give notice did not give it, and clause 35.1(a) excludes casuals from that scheme entirely. Clause 35.1(f) adds that any such deduction must not be unreasonable. That clause is about someone who quit, not someone who stopped turning up, and our page on staff who quit without notice covers it.
Then you are not looking at an absence problem, you are looking at a staffing problem, and the fix is upstream. Two things worth checking in that order.
First, whether the roster is the cause. A repeated pattern of no shows on the same day of the week, or from the same group of people, is usually a shift nobody wants rather than a workforce nobody can rely on. Second, whether the pay rate is the cause. If a casual can earn the same money at a venue with an easier Friday, they will, and the award rate is the floor rather than the market. Our pages on restaurant staff turnover and the hospitality staff shortage set out what the published data says about both.
And if the answer is that you genuinely cannot staff the service, the question becomes which parts of it have to be done by a person standing in the building. Answering the phone is not one of them.
This is a reading of the award and the Act, not legal advice, and a dismissal decision turns on facts that no page can see. Three limits worth stating plainly.
What do you do when an employee does not show up for work?
Make contact the same shift and record it, make a second attempt in writing, cover the shift, and apply your absence process. Do not treat the non attendance as a resignation: ending the job is a dismissal on the employer's initiative under section 386 of the Fair Work Act.
Is three days of no contact abandonment of employment?
Not under the Restaurant Industry Award. The consolidated MA000119 text contains no abandonment of employment clause at all, so there is no three day rule in the award to rely on.
Can you sack someone for not turning up?
There can be a valid reason, but the decision is a dismissal and is judged under section 387 of the Fair Work Act, which looks at whether there was a valid reason, whether the person was notified of it and whether they had a chance to respond.
Do casuals have unfair dismissal rights?
A casual with a regular and systematic pattern of work can accrue the minimum employment period, which is 6 months, or 12 months where the employer has fewer than 15 employees. Being a casual is not by itself a defence.
What does covering a no show shift cost?
Overtime under Table 7 of clause 23.4 runs at 150% of the minimum hourly rate for the first 2 hours Monday to Friday and 200% after that, 175% then 200% on Saturday, and 200% all day Sunday. Clause 23.2 can extend the overtime rate into the next shift.
Can I deduct pay from someone who stopped coming in?
Clause 35.1(d) allows a deduction of no more than one week's wages, but it applies to an employee aged at least 18 who was required to give notice of resignation and did not. It excludes casuals, and it is not a provision about unexplained absence.