Leave for your lunch. Remember the following for the future if you are given trouble later.
The company can get in trouble for what the other employees are doing, which is not taking a mandatory by law lunch. I’ve worked in good places where they actually remind people that a lunch hour is not optional and the company didn’t need the legal trouble of them skipping lunch. Employees that get in trouble for not working through lunch often call and report it leading to companies losing money.
I’m adding my voice to the chorus of “take your full hour.”
I think the fact that you aren’t being paid well is very important in your calculation. If this was an incredible job that you didn’t want to risk losing for any reason, then by all means work 50 hours a week. However, it sounds like this job isn’t worth all this extra (unspoken) work.
My anecdote: I was hired at the same time as my co-worker, we’ll call her W. We shared a cubicle, and she always worked through lunch, came in a half-hour earlier, and worked 3-4 hours from home every weekend. My bosses told her repeatedly that she didn’t need to work more than 40 hours a week, so she simply stopped telling them about her extra hours. She was willing to work 50 hours a week for the pay of 40 hours. I was not. An unfortunate post-script: my company had to cut reduce its budget this December. I was fired; she was not. I don’t blame them; she is willing to work long periods of time for free. It’s just not worth it to me.
You have to decide whether this job (low on the totem pole, low pay) is worth working extra. If not, just work your mandated hours.
That was my thought too. “Everyone else works through lunch” can be powerful peer-pressure for the next guy to do it too. Next thing you know, then entire office is afraid to actually take a lunch.
I say, take your lunch hour. The entire thing.
One of two things will happen;
1> Other people will break loose from their fear and either join you or begin taking their own lunches.
2> Someone will come and talk to you about it, telling you not to take your lunch break.
I have been hassled both by management and co-workers for taking lunch (or any breaks at all in 10-11 hour days). This was in a company that was gleefully working salaried employees to death. For while, I bought into this, but after awhile I started taking my time. I used to get the stinkeye from managers and words of resentment from co-workers, but I was waiting to see if anything would happen at review time. It didn’t. (That company refused to rate anyone higher than “meets expectations” anyway, because of wanting to withhold raises.) Further adding insult, the smokers were allowed to take ten or fifteen minutes every hour to smoke. I refused to start smoking to get break time (this was repeatedly suggested to me by co-workers).
Lack of respect for personal time often indicates a poisonous company culture. It was basically assumed that the company owned you at all times, and could load you down with infinite amounts of work to do in your spare time if it so desired. Failing to do so was considered “inflexible”. Your scenario may be different - do you work with a lot of young people? I’ve found that many young people substitute working many hours at the office for actual performance indications, both from the perspective of management and as employees.
I sucked it up long enough to get a higher-paying job at a company that understands that good employees need time away. Not surprisingly, the caliber of employees is miles and away higher.
Take the hour.
Except for the most part contracts don’t exist. And supervisors don’t always specifically express their views.
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Rodgers01**, since you are talking about your parents and being the low man, I assume you are young and new to the working world. Let me explain how the working world works. When you go to work at a company, you need to follow the culture they have established. They don’t have to bend to your preferences. While companies have specific guidelines laid out by HR, there are often “unwritten rules” on how to look, act and behave at your company in order to be successful. Why are your coworkers eating at their desk? Is it because they are high achievers or do they simply not have anything better to do during lunch?
People weren’t born into their positions. You rise higher on the totem pole by getting recognition leading to promotion. Now I don’t know what you do or if you have a good job or not. But I can tell you that you are too young to have an attitude of nickle and diming your breaks and lunches. You should be busting your ass so that your boss recognizes that you are a hard worker. Not someone who only wants to put in the minimum effort required by law and corporate policy.
Think about this phrase–“Welcome to the Recession”.
Your Boss will mention this, I’m sure.
When I was working produce at Kroger, I simply left an hour early instead of taking unpaid lunch. (Well, more like I took lunch at the end of my shift and clocked out then instead of clocking lunch, waiting around for an hour, then clocking out.) Everybody in my department did it, including the manager.
It was like that at a lot of places I’ve been to. I prefer a little break, so I always go out, regardless of what the others do. But it seemed that after a while I could usually get a few people to join me. I say go and invite people once or twice a week (not so often as to be annoying.)
You can always mention that you feel more productive in the afternoons if you’ve gotten away for a bit to stretch and clear your head.
Again, it is not up to you to tell your boss what time of day you “feel more productive”.
Shittier jobs tend to focus more on petty beurocracy and strict adherance to the letter of the corporate policy. That is because the people who work in those jobs tend to be less professional. They tend to be almost like lazy, retarded children. They need to be told specifically when to be where and what to do, otherwise they wander off or don’t do anything. In more educated, professional environments, people tend not to pay attention to clock punching or how long you take for lunch unless it becomes an issue. But they also tend to pay attention to a lot of superficial or image related stuff - wear the right clothes, speak the proper way, always be positive, don’t bring your lunch to a client because it looks cheap, etc.
Take the hour.
It shouldn’t matter to anyone, but you can bring this up with your boss and mention how productive you are after lunch, but only if you have a break for an hour.
Just to understand the situation in the office and his take on it.
Why not ask some of the other people in the office to join you for lunch some place?
Later you can try to guess the reason for everyone eating at their desk.
To be the opposite voice of msmith537, every job I’ve worked has had a culture of work-through-lunch-then-work-to-6, but in every case I’ve bucked the system, worked 8 and done (usually I’d work through lunch and end up doing something absurd like an 8-4) and got promoted for it on the merits of my work–in point of fact, I’m likely to get a raise here soon because I was sitting around on my ass for a few hours a day after finishing up my assigned duties, so I took over another entire project.
My vote is on “talk to your supervisor”, you oughta be able to get the sense pretty quick about how harshly you’ll be judged for taking a lunch away, and factor that into your calculations.
Also, in a salaried position, it might well indeed be part of your duty to let your boss know how to schedule you for maximum output on your part. I’ve been more unhappy with people who worked through lunch and slumped who then started taking a lunch and their afternoon productivity shot up–smarter, not harder, folks, at least if you work for me.
That is not how it works. That may be how you treated employees when you were a manager type, but that isn’t the rule.
I accept that as I’m in the UK (and indeed in the public sector) employment law is a little different to those working in the US and/or the private sector - thanks Nava for reminding me of that. 
However I’m glad to see I’m not alone in holding my view, and reiterate to take the lunch break until (or in fact, unless) it’s flagged up as an issue, and if it is discuss it rather than immediately saying “of course I’ll work through my lunch break!”.
Oh yeah? Which part?
I have come to the conclusion that working in a regular corporate job is very different than my previous jobs working in professional service firms (ie law, consulting, accounting, etc). People are like unthinking robots (probably why the companies have to hire consultants in the first place). When do I start? What time is lunch? What time can I leave? What color pen should I use on my TPS report? For the past 6 months, my team has literally done almost nothing because we didn’t have a Director to report to and the VP forbid me, as the next in line, from taking on any of those responsibilities so we could actually function. It’s much more important to maintain some paper reporting structure than to do actual work.
Consulting firms, at least the ones where I worked, are very different. You have client billable hours which is how the company makes money. All they care about is how much you bill. You can come in late, leave early, take a 3 hour lunch, but you had better meet your billing goals. Of course that’s hard to do if you are taking long lunches and working 4 hour days. People just don’t think in terms of “what time do I get out of here?” or “I have 60 minutes for lunch”. They think in terms of “where can I bill X hours this week?” and “how soon until I can make sr associate/manager/director/partner?”
But yes, when I was a manager in a consulting firm and you are on my staff, you can expect that you may have to stay late, work through lunch, work on a weekend, even pull an occassional all nighter. I don’t particularly like doing that either, but if that’s what the client and the company expects, that’s what needs to be done. As a corporate manager, fuck it. No one works late here so I’m not going to drive people to work crazy hours for no reason.
Whether one is better than another is a matter of personal preference I suppose. There are pros and cons to both types of businesses. Both have their own aggrivations.
I look at consulting firms as places where generally hard work initative and putting in extra effort is encouraged, even required. You get asked to do something new, you find out how to do it. You have some time on your hands, see if you can help someone. Want to take a client out for lunch? Knock yourself out. It’s almost like no one cares what you do as long as you a) bill your target hours b) make the client happy and c) are doing something that benefits either the company or the company’s ability to market you. Basically people work for those types of companies because that’s what they want to do for a living.
But someone from “industry” (what we call corporate America) might come into the same job with the same skills and totally not succeed. If they are always leaving at 6 or taking long lunches for no reason or just doing what they are asked, the won’t advance as quickly. They may see a company full of workaholics and type A jerks (which is not completely inaccurate). They might not be a team player and resent having to “fit in” with team dinners and lunches and happy hours and whatnot. They might be inflexable in performing any tasks they don’t feel are “their job”. Those people don’t really last long at those companies and are better off in the rigid structure of a corporate job.
Anyhow, my point is I think it’s fine to talk to your boss and find out his expectations on lunch and face time and so on. But unless you are someone otherwise a superstar, you don’t get very far dictating to your boss what and how you will work.
If you are getting your work done, take the full hour. Some people always appear to be working and they get very little done. If you are too uncomfortable, go to HR or your supervisor and ask if that is really what is expected of you. Sounds like a Japanese mentality.
At my job, we are actively discouraged from working during lunch or breaks.
I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, you’re entitled to an hour, so you should take the hour without giving a damn what everyone else does or is thinking.
On the other hand, it really depends on your workplace, the culture there, and what kind of worker you are. Is it high-volume and busy, with daily deadlines and a nonstop stream of stuff that needs to be done now, or is it a more leisurely kind of shop? Do you perform as efficiently and effectively as your co-workers? Are you covering all the responsibilities of your position in a timely manner? Is there anything on which you could take initiative?
If you can make yourself a more valuable employee by working through the hour, I say you should do it.
I’d wait until you’ve passed your probation period before breaking the bad habit this office seems to be imposing. Not taking breaks decreases efficiency, plus during your lunch hour you’re often making a game plan to get the afternoons work done in the best order - but as stated up post it depends on what kind of job you’re doing.