Got this e-mail from our boss today:
Is this legal?
I hardly ever take a lunch break, and even if I did, it would be maybe 15 minutes, not 30. I would be bored out of my mind if I have to sit around doing nothing for 30 minutes.
Please, Dopers, let me know what you think. Cites would be much appreciated.
In California they can. Actually, it’s not so much that they can force you, workers are required by law to take a meal period, and the employer can be punished if you don’t.
California cite.
It’s not required by Federal law, though.
The best I can find for Virginia is that it’s only required for workers under 16 (question #3).
Why on Earth would it be illegal?
A good place to start: http://www.dli.state.va.us
Another good one: http://www.dol.gov/esa/programs/whd/state/state.htm
Are the breaks paid or unpaid? Are you permitted to leave the premises? Are you considered on-call?
It’s to prevent sweatshop-like conditions. The reason it’s required by CA law and not optional is to prevent an employer from coercing or tricking a worker into not taking a break.
Thank you garygnu and Gfactor, I will check out the links.
The breaks are unpaid, and yes we can leave the building and would not be considered on-call.
The problem is, it essentially forces us to be “at work” for 8.5 hours. She knows most of us don’t take lunch breaks. Most of us work right through lunch and perhaps take 10 minutes to eat a sandwich at our desks. What is her rationale for forcing/requiring us to take 30 minute breaks? It doesn’t make sense. We work in an office doing public policy research and analysis, so it’s not like it’s essential for us to “rest.”
What does it say in your employment contract?
It’s the law because otherwise employers can claim that their workers “voluntarily” skipped lunch and breaks. This is standard labor law. If you want to keep working go ahead, but your employer is required by law to give you a lunch break. She’s trying to protect herself from getting sued by someone who wants to take a long lunch instead of eat at their desk.
So you are actually trying to renegotiate your work start and stop times by working through your lunch hour, am I reading you correctly? That is, if you say that you worked instead of taking lunch, you would be able to leave a half hour earlier than usual?
As for the ‘not necessary to rest’ thing, I think most stress experts would advise against plodding straight through an 8 hour task with no breaks. Attention spans are only so long before quality starts to suffer. maybe she just wants you to take a break and recharge so you can come back to your desk with a breath of fresh air.
http://blog.laborlawcenter.com/2006/09/06/virginia-va-wage-and-hour-laws/ has a discussion of Virginia break standards, too (Control-F “Break”) to find it.
I would call the state Department of Labor and Industry and ask: http://www.dli.state.va.us/whoweare/contact/add_phone.html
Or call the local bar association.
I’m not going to give you legal advice, but I will note that my employer has a similar policy, which was blessed by the company attorney. 
The “rest” part isn’t the issue, and it’s probably not out of concern for you. A lot of employers do this because some employees “eat at their desks,” get paid to work, and don’t get much done.
Maybe you could let your boss know you prefer to lunch around 5pm (or whenever you would like to leave work…).
I think this is becoming a national trend,- to make workers take their breaks.
Too many employers have been sued lately for not paying workers who work through breaks, or getting sued for not giving them to begin with.
If you don’t take your full lunch and still leave after 8.5 hours you could (possibly) sue them years later for the back wages.
If you take a 15 minute lunch and leave after 8.1/4 hours how is your employer going to keep track of everyone who takes a 5, 10, 15, or 25 minute lunch and then have everyone leaving the building at different times?
Best to take the 30 minutes and give yourself a break while co-operating with your employer. You both win.
There’s a lot of relevant back story here that is long but in a nutshell: we used to be salaried, which I think was correct since we’re specialized professionals and in my case I supervise people and act independently… anyway during our “busy season” we would work really long hours (which was fine with me) and one employee started complaining and eventually called the labor department, and said she thought we shouldn’t be salaried, and that we should get overtime… so under this pressure our boss made us hourly employees, to cover her butt against any possible overtime lawsuits.
But she was bitter and mad about the whole thing so she instituted this overzealous policy about hours and time sheets and sign-in and out e-mails (essentially like punching a timecard). All of this was very burdensome and time-consuming to us and I really feel it was made overly-complicated as a kind of revenge against us.
All of us are educated professionals, many with law degrees, doing specialized political/government research. This is the first time I have ever been paid hourly since I have been out of college!
Also because of this situation, none of us got a raise this year. (In years past, we would get a raise every July)…
And then just last week, she tells us she is changing our leave policy so now we’re getting 7 fewer days of leave per year!!
And now she says we MUST take a 30-minute break each day?! Why???
I honestly believe she is doing this out of spite and as a way to squeeze more time out of us, because she knows people are going to be working during those 30 minutes anyway.
OK sorry about the tangent, but to answer your question Patty O, no I am not trying to renegotiate my start and finish times. Since this whole change to hourly went down in July, she made it very clear we’re not supposed to work one second over 8 hours. So I would work from 9 to 5 every day, and if I did take a lunch, I would work that much longer. So would everyone else. So why is she implementing this all of a sudden?
There is a form that you can sign to waive the lunch break rule. I know this because when I returned to work after Son #2 it was for a shortened day - six hours. The law said IIRC, that after 5.5 hours worked an employee must be provided with a lunch break. I had to do some digging, but I did indeed find the pertinent law and printed it out, backing up my stance that I didn’t want a lunchbreak.
IME it was used to keep people in the office later into the day. The “I’ll just take my lunch at 4 then” wouldn’t fly. Again, IME, the office worker needs to be there during the company’s business hours. Which these days are typically 8-5. Forcing the employee to take a lunch allows the business to keep their hours; the employees to be physically there when the door is closed for the day and not exceeding the regular hourly wage, since the business operates for nine hours a day.
I hated lunch breaks - I always wanted to go home earlier.
In CA this only applies to hourly employees.
We just went through this at my workplace. A lot of our jobs in IT got reclassified as non-exempt, so the law does require us to take at least a half hour if we work more than five hours in a shift. We also get overtime when called upon to work more than 40 hours in the week, which is nice when you support a system that’s supposed to be up and running 24/7.
The only downside is that I had more flexibility when I was salaried. I could take a long lunch, and maybe net out for the day at less than 8 hours knowing I would probably have to log in later and read emails or whatever, and I would make up the deficit. When you’re hourly you’re supposed to have a shift before lunch, and a shift after lunch all totaling eight hours plus at least another half hour for lunch.
Oh yeah, the other downside is that the extra pay we get now for overtime will likely cut into our bonuses. In one sense, that’s actually fair because a lot of what the bonus was for, was our dependability and willingness to work off hours when called upon to troubleshoot and fix things. But now we get paid for that in the next paycheck, so it may be a wash after all.
Don’t argue this one with your boss if you’re salaried, BTW. Your boss might just declare your new shift is 9 hours.
Just a WAG:
If you work on your break time, and you get hurt, the company’s insurance may not pay.
Again, just a WAG.
Actually, Crafter Man, it’s a VERY wild assed guess, and probably wrong. 
Everyone else who is NOT offering qualified legal advice on the state of the law in Virginia should shut up at this point, since you are not offering the “Straight Dope” in any way. Gfactor offered relevant information; the OP will probably follow up on it. 