Unpaid lunch
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it's where you show off your union-recommended salary increase and tell them to make you a better offer.
wrote last edited by [email protected]OH, you mean in a country with workers rights and a decent work culture. For a second I thought you fellows were American. Someone said "states" and I just jumped to conclusions lol.
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This is less common than you think, and gets pretty hazy pretty fast where it is true.
The real reason is payroll and accounting.
If you leave an hour early to take your lunch, it looks like you only worked 7 hours.
Could this be fixed? Probably. But accountants are notoriously salty about anything that threatens to crack the mold.
In my timesheets, when I work is logged and automatically calculated. If I put in 8am to 12pm. Then enter 1pm to 5pm, with a 1 hour gap for lunch it calculates 8 hours, if I put in 8am to 4pm, and have "lunch" at the end of the day, it still calculates 8 hours.
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What state that? I live Oklahoma that follows only federal law, and I been told repeatedly that there is no federal mandate for giving employees breaks at all.
You are correct in that statement. There is no federal mandate for breaks or meals, which is super shitty. However, there is a requirement for at least a meal break in 21 of the states which vary in requirements, some even extending to normal breaks.
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Half an hour?
Damn.
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In a lot of states it’s illegal for workers to work too many consecutive hours without a break, especially if it’s a physical labor job. Your employer may legally not be able to allow this.
Though sometimes they are just petty and inflexible.
At Lowe's and they had to crack down on this due to a new(ish) Florida law. Can't work more than 6 hours of an 8 hour shift without a break. If I took a late lunch, of my own accord, they would get dinged for "forcing" me to work too long. Fair enough.
Yet another reason I love working for salary. So much less bullshit, so much more flexibility. If I want to knock off a couple hours early, go kayaking, work in the evening to run updates, fine.
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One problem is that if others are dependent on you being there, this screws 'em. Guys at the other Lowe's store did it all the time. By the middle of the afternoon the garden center was dead, who care's if there's only one guy for an hour?
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Wait, so you don't eat for 8 hours?
I had dinner last night around 630pm. I'm not planning to eat anything until around 1pm today - and that might be optimistic. I subsist on sleep, coffee, and rage until then.
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My entire career, I got a one-hour lunch, and two, paid, ten-minute breaks.
I know some will say you'd rather not because that's just more time at work, but with a one-hour lunch you can leave work, that's the whole point. It's a real break. One hour is enough time to go to a restaurant, or you can eat at work, and take a short walk. Half-an-hour is barely enough to time to eat and use the bathroom.
I guess what I'm saying is unionize.
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Wait, so you don't eat for 8 hours?
I eat one big dinner each day, so I go around 23 hours between meals. It takes a little acclimation, but I don't get "hangry" anymore and can go much longer without effect if something comes up and I have to delay eating.
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Wait, so you don't eat for 8 hours?
That's not a problem at all. I've been intermittent fasting for almost 10 years now. Started with 36 hour fasts 3 times a week. Then eventually started following my shift work schedule. If I was evenings I'd eat breakfast and lunch, if I was days I'd only eat supper. Now I'm days only so I only eat supper.
My parents who are almost in their 70's started doing it a few years back and they lost a ton of weight. The thing I love about fasting is it changes how you deal with hunger. My body being hungry doesn't really phase me, I'm able to ignore it rather easily. I don't get stomach aches or headaches. I can mentally tell myself that this is my fasting window and it makes it really easy to not eat.
It's hard to explain without you actually doing it but it was one of the best choices I've made. I'll never go back.
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Not eating lunch and taking a break is bad for your health and potentially undermines your productivity. It's a bad idea all around.
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There's all kinds of legal murk with this.
If you don't get a break and you make a mistake that injures or kills you or someone else, the employer is responsible.
If you "don't get" a break, either by force or voluntarily (the reason actually doesn't matter), then many places consider that to be.... For lack of a better description (my brain can't think of one right now): bad working conditions, and illegal.
Even if you voluntarily skip you break/lunch, the thin line between that being fine, or a problem for the company, is whether you want to hire a lawyer and make it a problem or not.
That's liability that they don't want.
I guarantee they couldn't give any less of a shit whether you take your lunch/breaks or not, except for the fact that it could affect them.
I'm thankful for this, because bluntly, otherwise, they just wouldn't give you a break at all.
They would put it on the books as you working a 9 hour shift, and taking your lunch at the end of the day, but tell you that you are on an 8 hour shift that has no breaks. Since they can't cover their ass like that, you get an unpaid lunch.The unpaid part was the compromise to get the legislation passed so they don't subject workers to inhumane conditions. Remember that the government is largely comprised of, or paid for by, businesses and business owners. So if it isn't, at the very least "fair" to business owners, it's not going to pass.
There's also the problem that if your coworkers skip theirs voluntarily, then you feel pressured to do the same and it's no longer voluntary. Breaks and lunch are legally required because otherwise you just don't get them at all because of the legal murkiness you mention.
When I worked at Target about a decade ago, if you missed your break, YOU got written up. They'd been sued so many times for not giving breaks that they FORCED you to take a break or be written up for it. If you were within 10 minutes of working into your lunch break, you can bet your ass someone was on a walkie talkie telling you to get your ass out and stop working. At the time they loved 4h45m shifts because it gave them 15 minutes buffer before you had to take a lunch.
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lol wtf are yearly evaluations?
A way to only give one raise per department by pitting coworkers against each other based on goals they set for themselves. No, really…
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This is literally what I do every day. I intermittent fast, so I don't eat until dinner. I work through lunch, take breaks whenever I need to get up and stretch my legs, and leave at ~4:15.
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Not eating lunch and taking a break is bad for your health and potentially undermines your productivity. It's a bad idea all around.
And that's why lunch should be paid if it's inside the workday.
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And that's why lunch should be paid if it's inside the workday.
This is how it is at my current job in Denmark. Never experienced it before working in Denmark.
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In a lot of states it’s illegal for workers to work too many consecutive hours without a break, especially if it’s a physical labor job. Your employer may legally not be able to allow this.
Though sometimes they are just petty and inflexible.
It's not illegal where I live but it's against my union rules (though it's not a labour job). They have super strict rules about exactly when we should take our breaks. I get it in principle because there are asshole bosses who would try to force people to work through their breaks or shame them into it, but it really sucks for those of us who just don't mind pushing through so we can leave early or like to take late lunches.
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I can't because it wouldn't make much sense, we need people working together to do stuff so break times are synchronized
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Wait, so you don't eat for 8 hours?
No, I normally eat for about ten minutes.
