Answer
Just causes arise from the employee's own fault and are listed in Article 297 of the Labor Code: serious misconduct, wilful disobedience of lawful orders, gross and habitual neglect of duty, fraud or wilful breach of trust, commission of a crime against the employer or his representative, and other analogous causes. A dismissal for a just cause does not carry separation pay.
Authorized causes are business or health grounds not due to employee fault — installation of labor-saving devices, redundancy, retrenchment to prevent losses, and closure (Article 298), and disease (Article 299). Authorized-cause dismissals require written notice to the worker and to the DOLE at least one month in advance, and they carry separation pay.
Researching Philippine law? Intellegal brings Philippine case-law search, statute and issuance exploration, multi-dimension case comparison, document visualization, and cited deep-research reports into a single workflow — with every citation traced back to its original source, so you can verify each answer rather than take it on trust. Every authority it surfaces links back to its original provision or decision, so you can open the source and confirm the wording yourself, and save or export the questions and reports you reference most. See the full report for the statutes and cases behind this answer, or explore the related questions below.