Quitting Counts as Being Fired in Minnesota Only if the Employer Meant to Make You Quit — Intolerable Conditions Alone Are Half the Test

What the doctrine is for

Constructive discharge is not a claim. It is a way of proving one element of a claim — that something happened to you that the law treats as an adverse employment action. The Minnesota Supreme Court said so plainly in Henry v. Independent School District #625, No. A21-0004 (Minn. Feb. 8, 2023), slip op. at 21: “a plaintiff can satisfy the adverse employment action element of a disparate treatment claim under the Human Rights Act by demonstrating constructive discharge.”

That matters for what you have to show. A constructive discharge finding does not establish that the employer discriminated. It establishes that the resignation counts as a firing, and the rest of the claim under Minn. Stat. § 363A.08 still has to be proved.

The court was candid about how little Minnesota law there was on the subject before 2023. Slip op. at 21:

Our court has had few opportunities to discuss constructive discharge beyond general principles, but we have previously described constructive discharge as requiring: (1) objectively intolerable working conditions that are (2) created by the employer with the intention of forcing the employee to quit.

Element one: intolerable, judged by a reasonable person

Minnesota’s statement of the doctrine is a single sentence, and the supreme court cited an earlier decision of its own for it — a decision whose own formulation was shorter. Continental Can Co. v. State, 297 N.W.2d 241, 251 (Minn. 1980) (citing Danz v. Jones, 263 N.W.2d 395, 403 n.4 (Minn. 1978)):

A constructive discharge occurs when an employee resigns in order to escape intolerable working conditions caused by illegal discrimination.

The test is objective. Henry, slip op. at 21: “And we agree at the outset with federal courts that the test is an objective one: constructive discharge arises when the ‘working conditions [are] so intolerable that a reasonable person would have felt compelled to resign.’” The quoted words inside that sentence are the United States Supreme Court’s, in Pennsylvania State Police v. Suders, 542 U.S. 129, 147 (2004), as Henry reproduces them, and the sentence they come from was checked against Suders at 147 for this page.

Henry’s second contribution is that “intolerable” does not mean one thing. What the conditions have to look like depends on the theory the employee is proceeding under. Slip op. at 24:

Thus, we hold that the objectively intolerable conditions necessary to support a constructive discharge based on disparate treatment are not necessarily the same as those required to support a constructive discharge based on a hostile work environment.

On the harassment route, the bar is the harassment standard: a plaintiff “must prove that she quit due to intolerable harassment that satisfies the severe-or-pervasive standard,” slip op. at 23 — the standard worked through on harassment after the 2024 amendments.

On the disparate-treatment route, Henry adopted a different picture, at 24:

The requisite objectively intolerable conditions for a constructive discharge based on disparate treatment can occur “[w]hen an employer acts in a manner so as to have communicated to a reasonable employee that she will be terminated, and the plaintiff employee resigns.”

The court put the same idea in the borrowed phrase that runs through the opinion: a case where “the handwriting [is] on the wall and the axe was about to fall.” Id. at 25. Both quotations come from one federal decision Henry adopted and identifies, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. University of Chicago Hospitals, 276 F.3d 326, 332 (7th Cir. 2002).

And it drew the line on the other side, at 28: a working condition does not become intolerable “merely because ‘a prospect of discharge lurks in the background.’”

Element two: the employer has to have meant it

This is the element that ends most claims, and Minnesota requires it deliberately.

The Court of Appeals explained why in 1995. Pribil v. Archdiocese of St. Paul & Minneapolis, 533 N.W.2d 410, 413 (Minn. Ct. App. 1995), reversed a trial court that had said the employer’s intent was irrelevant:

In our view, the more persuasive authority is the approach adopted by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which requires an employee to show that the employer intended to force the employee to resign. The constructive discharge doctrine was created to prevent employers from forcing employees into resigning by engaging in covert, calculated misconduct that would be illegal if done overtly. Because the doctrine was intended to prevent intentional wrongdoing, scienter is a necessary element. Intent can be proven with direct or circumstantial evidence, or it can be inferred upon a showing that the employee’s resignation was a reasonably foreseeable result of the employer’s conduct.

The same opinion corrected the trial court’s other error, at 412: a quotation suggesting the inquiry “focuses on the employee’s state of mind” “implies that the employee’s subjective feelings about the working conditions are relevant, when in fact the test is objective,” and “how the individual respondents felt about the working conditions at the CEC is not determinative.”

The supreme court adopted that structure in 2023 and stated the two routes as a holding. Henry, slip op. at 25–26:

To the extent we have not done so expressly in prior cases, we adopt this employer-intent requirement and hold that a plaintiff alleging disparate-treatment-based constructive discharge under the Human Rights Act may satisfy this requirement in one of two ways: (1) by demonstrating that the employer deliberately created intolerable working conditions with the intent of forcing the employee to quit, or (2) by demonstrating that resignation was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the employer’s deliberate actions.

The court’s stated reason for keeping the requirement at all is worth reading, because it explains why this doctrine is narrow by design: “Requiring employer intent keeps constructive discharge on par with actual discharge as an adverse employment action.” Id. at 26.

One clarification in a footnote closes a trap. The employer-intent element is about intent to make the employee quit, not about discriminatory motive: “the employer-intent requirement of constructive discharge in the disparate treatment context does not require an employee to show the employer’s actions were motivated by discrimination,” because a prima facie case already requires separate proof that the circumstances give rise to an inference of discrimination, and requiring it twice “would be duplicative.” Id. at 28 n.7.

Minnesota deliberately did not add a notice requirement

Several federal courts hold that an employee who quits without giving the employer a chance to fix the problem cannot claim constructive discharge. The district court in Henry applied that rule and granted summary judgment on it. The supreme court reversed and refused to adopt it, at 26–27:

Because we adopt the employer-intent requirement, we decline to require, as the district court did here, that plaintiffs alleging disparate-treatment-based constructive discharge notify their employers of the intolerable conditions or otherwise attempt to mitigate the alleged mistreatment before resigning.

And the reasoning, at 26–27:

When an employer is intentionally trying to get rid of an employee, it makes little sense to also require that employee to give the employer a chance to work out the problem. In such circumstances, requiring an employee to notify the employer and try to resolve the situation before quitting will often be an exercise in futility that serves only to create an extra obstacle to the employee’s recovery …

The holding is stated narrowly, at 27: “We therefore decline to impose a mitigation requirement on plaintiffs claiming disparate-treatment-based constructive discharge.” The court was drawing a line against the hostile-environment cases where the requirement had come from, noting that the Eighth Circuit decision the district court relied on “was a sexual harassment case in which the employee ‘never told anyone there was a problem in need of fixing.’” Id. at 26.

Unemployment runs on an entirely different rule, and it is the opposite one

A resignation that could support a constructive discharge claim in district court does not become a discharge for unemployment purposes. The Legislature took the doctrine off the table by name. Minn. Stat. § 268.095, subd. 5(c):

When determining if an applicant was discharged, the theory of a constructive discharge does not apply.

Subdivision 2(b) says the same thing in the other direction — “the theory of a constructive quit does not apply” — so neither side can recharacterize the separation. What subdivision 5(a) does supply is its own objective test of what a discharge is: “A discharge from employment occurs when any words or actions by an employer would lead a reasonable employee to believe that the employer will no longer allow the employee to work for the employer in any capacity.”

If you quit, the unemployment question is not whether you were constructively discharged. It is whether one of the ten exceptions in subdivision 1 applies, and the one written for bad conditions is subdivision 3’s “good reason caused by the employer,” which has three elements — a reason “directly related to the employment and for which the employer is responsible,” “adverse to the worker,” and one “that would compel an average, reasonable worker to quit and become unemployed rather than remaining in the employment.” § 268.095, subd. 3(a).

The ten exceptions, the closed definition in subdivision 3(g), and the arithmetic of the disqualification are on quitting and still collecting unemployment. How the record gets built in the one hearing that decides it is on the unemployment hearing that decides the case.

Why most of these claims fail, from the two Minnesota cases that decided them

Navarre v. South Washington County Schools, 652 N.W.2d 9 (Minn. 2002), is the supreme court’s pre-Henry application, and it is a loss on the intent element. A teacher sought lost wages on a constructive discharge theory after data-practices violations by the school district. At 32, after reciting the Continental Can and Pribil standards, the court described what the record held:

There is no evidence that appellant intentionally tried to force respondent to resign, or that it acted with the intention of creating an intolerable working environment for respondent. Instead, the record indicates that appellant offered respondent a teaching position at a school with a principal respondent was familiar with and that appellant was attempting to work with, rather than against, respondent in assuring the next school year was successful.

The supreme court affirmed the court of appeals and held that judgment notwithstanding the verdict should have been granted for the employer on the constructive discharge verdict. Id. The employee had also never pleaded constructive discharge. Id.

Henry is the other outcome, and the difference is the quality of the evidence rather than the severity of the conditions. What got her past summary judgment was direct testimony from her own supervisor, slip op. at 30: the supervisor “testified that Deputy Chief Davis instructed her to place Henry on a PIP and ensure she was ‘out by May’ so that the department could rehire,” and other managers “described the PIP as unnecessary and unachievable,” id. at 31. On the conditions element, also at 31, the court pointed to “the sudden and extreme change in the tenor of Henry’s performance evaluations — she had not received a negative performance review in the nearly 20 years she had been working for the School District but was suddenly being reprimanded for things as minor as clocking in a minute late.”

And the court took care to say what the case is not, at 31–32:

To be clear, the act of placing an employee on a PIP alone does not establish de facto grounds for a constructive discharge claim. … We emphasize that the placement of an employee on a PIP does not, by itself, constitute an adverse employment action, particularly when the PIP is “reasonable” and/or “minimally onerous.”

The ellipsis marks a quotation from a memorandum of agreement between the district and the employee’s union, which the court quoted for the proposition that improvement plans are an appropriate management tool. An employee “cannot simply rely on the mere existence of the PIP to prove her claim,” slip op. at 32, and what distinguished Henry was that the argument “is not based on mere speculation, conjecture, or fantasy. It is based on direct testimony from her supervisor, who was instructed by the Deputy Chief of the division, to exaggerate issues in Henry’s performance reviews, ‘pile on the work,’ and shorten deliverable dates to make her projects impossible to complete — all for the purpose of getting rid of her.” Id.

Read the two cases together and the pattern is not about how bad the job was. It is about whether someone inside the organization can be shown to have wanted the employee gone.

One thing Henry refused to expand

The court of appeals in Henry had also held that an adverse employment action could be shown by the cumulative effect of acts that would not individually qualify. The supreme court reversed that part, slip op. at 34: “We have never discussed, much less adopted, a cumulative effects theory,” and, “[u]nder the circumstances of this case, where Henry has not persuasively argued that the court should adopt this type of theory, we decline to adopt the court of appeals’ expansion of ‘the concept of an adverse employment action’ under the Human Rights Act.”

So the adverse-action element in a Minnesota disparate-treatment case is proved by a discharge, by a constructive discharge, or by an act that qualifies on its own — not by adding up slights.

What this page does not do

It sets out a two-element standard and the decisions that produced it. It does not evaluate a resignation, and the distance between “the job was intolerable” and “the employer meant to force me out” is exactly where these cases are decided — on emails, performance documents, and what supervisors say under oath about instructions they were given.

Whether the underlying treatment was unlawful in the first place is the threshold question; what a Human Rights Act claim can recover if it succeeds is on its own page.

Currency

The Revisor currently publishes the 2025 edition of Minnesota Statutes. The History line for § 268.095 ends “2022 c 98 art 4 s 51”; for § 363A.08 it ends “2023 c 52 art 19 s 52-56.” The Revisor’s table of Minnesota Statutes affected by session laws was queried one exact section at a time. No 2025 or 2026 row was returned for § 268.095 at all; subdivision 2 was last amended in the 2017 Regular Session (chapter 35, article 3, section 14), subdivision 3 in the 2007 Regular Session (chapter 128, article 6, section 70), and subdivision 5 in the 2017 Regular Session (chapter 35, article 1, section 4). Section 363A.08, subdivision 4, carries a 2026 Regular Session amendment (chapter 88, article 1, section 196); subdivision 2, the employment provision this page names, was last amended in the 2023 Regular Session (chapter 52, article 19, section 53). Henry, Navarre, and Continental Can are Minnesota Supreme Court decisions and Pribil is a published Court of Appeals decision; this page makes no representation about their later treatment, and a citator pass is not part of the verification behind it.