I think you should take your full lunch hour (and doing so away from the office is a great idea), take both breaks (morning and afternoon), and post articles up in the lunchroom about how not taking breaks seriously impairs worker efficiency. A human being can only work for about an hour before losing efficiency. Your co-workers are not doing the company any favours - not only are they destroying their productivity, but they are burning themselves out. Idiots.
Maybe at some point in your career you’ll have to play msmith’s game to get ahead (or even stay employed), but don’t sell your soul until you have to.
companies can get in quite a bit of trouble if hourly workers are working unpaid through lunch. should an employee report them they could be looking at huge fines. should an employee be taken to task for not working through an unpaid lunch the company could also be looking at a lawsuit.
off the clock is off the clock, it is your time, you can do with it what you will (i wouldn’t suggest anything illegal or immoral). it is not the companies time.
by taking your lunch hour you are saving the company money.
I say, take the hour. Once you start letting unfinished work eat into your lunch your, well, there it goes, and you’ll be bringing a peanut butter sandwich from home, working through, and despising your boss, the other employees, and the job. Take the Hour!
I once worked for a place just like that. There was so much work that at 5 p.m. everyone was still sitting at their desks working away! I had the ‘excuse’ that I had to catch a bus.
Start by taking an hour lunch. Every time it feels like someone is disapproving, add five minutes. Either they will eventually talk to you about it, at which point you can cut back to one hour, or you’ll end up with the whole afternoon off.
What “HR” are you people talking about. There are SIX full time employees working at this company. HR is probably a combination office manager/admin/girl who handles all benefits and HR paperwork. I would not be surprised if she was the owner’s niece or something.
Rodgers01, it might help if we knew exactly what sort of office you work in and what kind of work you do there. Also if you are salaried or hourly. And if you are comfortable, your education and professional background might help put things in context.
Maybe at that point when you think you’ve found a profession that you want to get into, you won’t be competetive enough to get hired? Or maybe you will get hired but won’t be able to keep your job? Or maybe you’ll get sick of being the “low man on the totem pole”?
To be quite honest, the OP sounds a little entitled. “I want to make more money”. “I don’t want to be the low man on the totem pole”. And yet the OP thinks these things should come to him even though everyone else works through lunch while he doesn’t want to.
I’m usually at my desk during lunch. However, I have my phone forwarded to go directly to voice mail and “appear offline” on IM while I’m eating my sack lunch and surfing the web.
Are you sure people are actually working while they’re eating? Or is it just because they eat at their desk that you think they work through lunch?
That said, take your lunch. Whether you leave for an hour or take a break at your desk for an hour, you need the break.
Just FYI - many, if not most, non-management jobs in the US do not involve employment contracts. The last corporate job I was at was for a major group of US companies with thousands of employees. Even most of the management had no employment contract. Only the high level executives had one.
So yes, in many American workplaces taking lunch at all will cause management to see you as a slacker, Federal labor laws be damned.
Pretty much my definition of the job from hell. Not only you’re worked to death, including nights and week-ends, but you’re expected to have “team dinners” and such crap on top of it.
And you advise the OP not to take an hour for lunch because otherwise he won’t be able to get a job like yours? Wow! A boss could probably pressure me into working on lunch time by threatening me with a promotion to a position like that.
Fuck that! There are plenty of people who make money and don’t have a work environment remotely as toxic as yours.
What are the promotion opportunities in a company employing 6 workers, anyway? Head of a department with 2 agents, him included? Being number three out of a list of six?
Unfortunately, there really ARE a lot of Americans who sincerely feel that if you don’t come in, stay late, give up lunch, do overtime work for free, and violate labor laws you aren’t a good employee and deserve to be unemployed and starving.
Wow, a lot more replies than I expected – thanks for all the input, and sorry for the delayed response; I just got home. To answer some questions:
I am salaried, not hourly.
I arrive early because I allow time for public transportation problems, just in case. I usually stay 20-30 minutes late just to finish up whatever I’m working on, and because I’m not in any particular rush in the evenings.
Before taking this job I interned at two similar companies (for personal reasons I don’t want to say what kind of company I work at), and everyone took their full lunch at both of those places. I based my expectations about the lunch breaks on those places, as well as on my own work history in other fields. At those companies, people would either eat out, or bring their lunch to the conference room to talk or read a magazine. During training at my current job I innocently asked if people ever ate lunch in the conference room; my supervisor looked at me strangely and said that she supposed it was theoretically possible, but since you’d have to keep answering the phone anyways, wouldn’t it make more sense to eat at your desk?
To the extent I can get out of my head and look at it objectively, I don’t think I sound entitled, and I’m a bit surprised at the accusation (though thank you, msmith537 for your differing opinion otherwise). Note that I did not complain that I’m the low man on the totempole or that I’m paid very little (and I am objectively paid very little for a professional job: I qualify for public housing assistance, which I think fits the bill. The upside is that the job has pretty good growth potential), but that my parents and others have argued that those facts are arguments for why I should take my full break. The thing I DID complain about is the lunch thing. Even if that’s the way the game is played (and whether or not I choose to play it), I don’t think that’s the way the game SHOULD be played, as most people seem to agree.
One thing you need to keep in mind here, Rodgers, is the source of the opinions telling you to not take your break - msmith and Rand Rover are about as corporate drone-y as they come - they seem fully bought-in to the capitalist myth, from what I’ve seen on these boards.
If it’s going to cost you your job to take a proper lunch, yeah, you’ll have to decide at that point if it’s worth it or not. I’ve been in the corporate world for 14 years now, and my experience is that management will treat you just as badly as you let them. One of the best things you can do at a new job is set the tone you want to work with right at the start. That way, you can either work the way you want to, or they’ll let you know it isn’t accepted there, and you can decide if you need to keep looking for another job. As you mentioned, not every company has a corporate environment that encourages working through lunch (and answering your phones!).
Sounds like the ‘ma and pa’ version of the law firm my friend used to work at. She was salaried too and was expected to be at work at least an hour before her normal start time and routinely stayed until late into the night. I’m talking about this girl working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week. They had her working so late that she’d be in the building after the a/c or heat turned off for the evening. Add this to an hour commute each way and the poor thing was working herself to death. Why did she do it? Because it was expected of her to do so. Her coworkers did the same and her bosses made it very clear it wasn’t up for discussion. And that was just disgusting. After much encouragement from her friends and family she finally left the job and was much better off for it.
I can’t even believe people are suggesting that workers who actually take a lunch break are slackers. I hope I never work for you guys.
Again, thanks for the US perspective which is obviously foreign to me. I think this discussion has confirmed for me yet again that I never want to go and work in the US.
This makes it sound like you’re expected to work while you eat lunch at your desk, or at least answer your phone. In other words, your hour “lunch break” is fictional, probably to get around local laws requiring employers to give employees time off for lunch.
A friend of mine works at a grocery store, and he learned real fast not to take his lunch break in the employee lounge, because sure as shit a manager would stick his head in at some time and ask him to take care of something. In fact, once when he was on his way out to get lunch his manager stopped him and started asking him about some work-related matter. My friend very obviously pushed a button on his wristwatch, and in response to the managers puzzled look said, “I’m turning off my timer. My lunch break doesn’t start until we’re finished talking.”
I don’t know that it’s fair to say they’ve “bought in” so much as they recognize that this attitude is one that exists, and seems to exist in the OP’s company. If everyone works through lunch, and you don’t, you may be viewed as a slacker, and it may affect your ability to take advantage of the job’s growth potential.
Many of the posts here suggest that the OP should take lunch because they think he should be allowed to take lunch, or that the company is legally required to let him take lunch. While the company may legally have to let him take lunch, they don’t have to promote him or even let him keep his job.
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