About twice a week, my department at the hospital where I work will announce a meeting that will take place during the lunch hour. When we protest, we are told “we can bring our lunches to the meeting” I’m sorry, but attending a meeting and being allowed to eat is not my idea of a lunch hour. Sometimes, I like to go running during my lunch hour, study, or work on a papper that’s due soon, etc. I live very close to work so sometimes I will just go home and crash for a few minutes. I thought the lunch break was employee time.
Yes! I’m not working now, but when I was a teacher, they’d organize team/staff/floor level meetings during our lunch break. Usually, I either had lunch or recess duty anyway, so the 25 minutes I had to myself each day was taken up with meetings.
I objected often and loudly, and they finally agreed, we should be able to have lunch be a break time. So, what did they do? Hold the meetings at 7:30am, when our contracts didn’t require us to be there until 8:00am. Heh. I suppose because we were teachers, we ‘owed it to the children’ to come to these early meetings. Grrrrr…
My boss co-opts my lunch most days of the week. We socialize a little, but we talk work mostly. I am relaxed with this, because when I had problems with my heater last week, I took the whole afternoon off with pay to get it fixed. It is a give and take. When I really don’t want to have him co-opt my lunch, I tell him I have plans. However, this is somewhat different than your position.
I think there are legal liabilities here, although I don’t know what they are. I know that you should not be expected to do anything work-related on your lunch hour unless you are paid for the time (salaried employees are probably exempt).
My supervisor is fanatical about everybody taking their lunch and both breaks because she’s worried that there will be a huge liability if there is a fatigue-related accident and it turns out the injured was not allowed an off-the-clock lunch hour.
I had a boss who used to try to get us into “training” meetings at lunch by offering to buy pizza. He gave up after the third try, when hardly anyone showed up and he was stuck with a bunch of cold pizza. If I was a boss, I’d never do this. People should take a break mid-day [sub]she says as she sits at her desk during lunch…[/sub]
Once a month my company buys pizza and then after we’ve eaten all the division heads get up and give a presentation about how their division is doing. Most of this is a waste of time to me - the divisions are quite separate from each other so why should I care how the other ones are doing?
We’re all supposed to attend, but I’ve discovered that I can grab some free pizza and go back to my office and surf and no one says anything about it.
Another salaried employee, and my firm takes up my lunch with meetings about twice a month. That does not include other work-related lunches (like with clients) nor does it include lunch hours I have to work through for whatever reason.
I have a sandwich at my desk about twice a week. I have a work-related “lunch” about once a week. I go out (actually take my lunch break) once or twice a week. And I have a work-related breakfast (at the bright shiny hour of 7 am) once a month.
“Working lunches” are not unusual for salaried people. In my line of work, it’s the non-working (or non-work-related) lunch that is the rarity.
I was a salaried employee for many years, and the predominant feeling of the management was always that if they spent $20 and bought us all pizza or sub sandwiches, we oughta be happy about giving up our lunch hour. Um, no. It always pissed me off that I was expected to give up my lunch hour. I did things on my lunch hour - worked out, ran errands, or just took a much-needed break from work.
I finally just decided that if they scheduled something for the noon hour, there was no reason for me to give up my lunch hour. I’d go ahead and attend their meeting, then go take an hour off and go for a run or do my errands. Or, I’d leave an hour early from work. I never had a boss say a thing to me about it.
We’re not even salaried employees. We are interns and recieve a stipend. We are also in unenviable position of being students, and we need positive evaluations from our clinical directors/instructors to advance academically and professionally.
I eat pretty much every single lunch at my desk. Sometimes dinner. Meetings at all time, but nobody ever eats during them.
The whole “lunch hour” thing doesn’t seem to apply to us. We’re pushed to work over 50 hours a week, and time taken “off” for lunch is not counted. So, if I took an hour off for lunch I’d have to stay another hour later or come an hour earlier the next day.
And they notice - a couple of people have been talked to already.
I often have meetings over my lunch hour, but almost all of those meetings are with people in different time zones. Can’t blame someone in California for scheduling a meeting at 12:00 CST (10:00 is a great time for a meeting in San Jose!). And if they wait, they start going to lunch. And by the time they are all getting back from lunch (around 2:00pm PST), I’m looking towards the door. (Hours here tend to be 7-4 CST, hours in California are more like 9-6 - making the time difference even more pronounced).
(Its really fun when we try and get folks from Europe and Asia in on the conversation - how many meeting have you attended in your 'jammies?)
But my local boss and local department almost never schedule “lunch” meetings. Upper management often has them, but they don’t bother to invite litt’l ole me. I guess they figure it beats staying late when you are salaried. (And, I think it says much of them that they give up their lunches almost daily, yet respect ours).
I used to have a job where the only meetings I tended to have were lunch meetings (consultant manager - taking consultants and clients out to lunch was a major part of the job).
Sometimes it seems like you’re supposed to attend meetings the entire workday, then do actual work on your own time. I was going through this on a major project my department is working on, but now somebody seems to have realized something, and planned the meetings so that only those people attend who are really needed. This gives everyone more time to work, and actually turns some of the meetings into positive experiences.
Well, I can beat the lunch meeting problem. I used to work in the NOC at a very large company. There was no scheduled lunch time or breaks. In fact when you went to eat lunch or take a break you had to take your desks cell phone with you in case someone called with a problem. If something went wrong you went straight back to your desk to deal with the problem. (Nothing like sitting on the can when a VP calls because something broke)
On the bright side they did buy us food all the time and it was good stuff, not just pizza. There were other perks as well like the concierge service that would get your car washed, take care of your dry cleaning or run other errands for you.
On slow days it wasn’t too bad but on busy days you were at your desk for 10 hours straight (minus bathroom breaks).
Salaried employee. It’s a rare day when I can take an hour off for lunch for my own time. There is just way too much work to be done. A quick lunch at the desk, internal lunch meetings, client meetings is my routine.
I will say that if the company expects a lunch meeting, it should at least be decent food. crappy pizza does not count.
[hijack] Dangerosa, try being on the Asian side of the time zone. It really sucks with New Yorkers. NY will only schedule during their work hours (12 hour difference so middle of the night). And there is an attitude in NY that because of the commute, it’s fine to work 9 to 5 or whatever the norm is. But somehow the rest of the world is expected to make 3:00 am concalls, stay in the office late or come early for an “important” group call. At least the west coast has an overlap, and they tend to not mind a 7:00 pm call/which is early morning for us[/hijack]
Yep. Our Asian plants are 24x7, so we can often find someone there during our normal hours, just never the person you want to talk to. Of course, the cultural work ethic there is different, so they seem to be more realistic about conference calls in their jammies than we are. We do try to be fair and split them up - and often hold two. One at 8am CST (which is the end of the workday in Europe), than a repeat of the meeting with the same US participants, but different international participants about 8:00 pm CST (the beginning of the workday in Asia). Usually, we want them to do something we don’t have the power to command, so we have to be nice to them. They are a lot more willing to do favors if we aren’t pulling them out of bed at 3am.
(I don’t work with New Yorkers currently, but used to. They were a pain in the butt to schedule even when you were only an hour off them. I’m sure there are New York lawyers who don’t think the world revolves around them, but I never scheduled a meeting with one).
Continuing hijack - Is it just me? Our Asian locations are in China, Singapore, Thailand and Malyasia. We can never get bad news out of these guys - they always play down the problem. I swear if a plant burned down it would come back the first time as a “delay in production” and it would take a week before we discovered the fire!