I was talking to a friend who lives in Indiana and she mentioned that her day at work was great because she was allowed a break and she was able to smoke a cigarette. So I tell her, they can’t do that, surely its not legal to not allow you to have breaks (She works 6 hour shifts at a major retailer) So I soon learn that in Indiana, employers are not required to allow employees a who work less than 8 hours a break at all, whether paid OR unpaid?! AND if the employee works more than 8 hours, they only have to be allowed an optional TWENTY minute unpaid break?! How can this be? How can the workforce of Indiana accept this? Are there other states where employees can be forced to work 6-7 hours straight without even an unpaid FIVE minute break? How can supervisors actually enforce this in good conscience? Am I missing something here? where is the revolt, Hoosiers? where is the outrage?
I imagine there are outrageous policies similar to this in every state. I don’t know about Indiana, but I live in Michigan and have friends who worked eight hour shifts: technically, they were supposed to be allowed a half-hour unpaid break every four hours, but their company would do such things as force them to take breaks one hour into their shift (when the crowd wasn’t as large), and sometimes the breaks were cut to 15-20 minutes (and if I recall correctly, occasionally they weren’t allowed to break at all). Illegal, yes; deserving of outrage, yes; but skated over. In their situation they would have been fired had they complained. (Working fast food does make one easily expendable.) I imagine your friend is in a similar situation; the power hierarchy prevents her from being able to improve her standing, and if the law allows it, that gives supervisors even less reason to feel a guilty conscience.
I’m not completely sure about the laws, but at my employer in Ohio, which is run by a Kentucky franchise, we are required to take a 30 minute unpaid break for anything over 5 hours of work. Failure to do so (even by accident) is worthy of termination. I’ve seen two or three be sent off for breaking this rule in my short time there. My old jobs here didn’t require a break, but were set up that you had a break when you could fit one in. One, before the smoking ban, allowed smoking on site regardless of what you were doing, so you just needed a break to eat, and that usually happened when we weren’t busy. Another was where you worked 8-12 hours straight, but could do all your work in 2 hours and spend the rest of the time watching tv (or surfing the dope in my case) so it wasn’t too bad.
Brendon
In Wisconsin, we are NOT required to give our employees a break. However, we are required to pay them for less then 30 minutes of non-work. That is, we don’t have to give them a break, but if they do take one and it’s less then 30 minutes, it must be paid.
In Wisconsin, breaks are recommened, but not required. Not giving a break for a 6+hour work day should be avoided
cite http://dwd.wisconsin.gov/er/labor_standards_bureau/breaks_and_meals.htm
Can I get a cite on that. All I could find is this (http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(edtek455pyh0asnjslmgtc45))/mileg.aspx?page=getobject&objectname=mcl-409-112&queryid=17441873&highlight=meal) which only mentions breaks being required for minors, but I’m having a hard time finding any laws for people over the age of 18 with regard to breaks. The reason I ask for a cite is that I do some of this type of stuff in my business (I guess you could call me an HR person, but in a company of 20 people there’s not much HR to do). Anyways, after hearing an employee say (not to me, I just overheard it) that ‘by law’ she was gets a 30 minute break. Being the type of person who likes to see factual info and not hearsay I pulled the relevent law (which I posted above), printed it, and showed it to everyone. She doesn’t know I heard her say that, but I just wanted to make sure everyone was clear about the issue. This happened when we where discussing new break rules (which by the way are perfectly fair at our place, 30 mins or less = Paid; 31 mins or more=Unpaid, no break if you work 4 hours or less). I just wanted people to understand that if that if they wanted to talk about the new break rules, that’s fine, but don’t tell me they arn’t legal unless you know what then hell you’re talking about. All my life I’ve always gotten sick of people talking about ‘laws’ that they heard and proclaiming them as the truth (if you ask an undercover cop type…it’s not legal for a police to act as a speedtrap if their hidden in a spot where you can’t see them…yea tell that to the judge…I’m required by law to have a break…that type of stuff. Find the law, show it to me, then we’ll talk)
Sorry for the rant, one of the ‘perks’ of my job is dealing with employees who seem to make things up, and this was a recent one.
I know that in a previous job I had to pull the americans with disabilities act into the picture. I started work at 11 am. Company policy dictated one of 2 lunch hours - 12-1 and 1-2. Being diabetic, I need to eat at certain intervals. I pointed out that there was no way I could survive being forced to eat lunch 2 hours after I ate breakfast, and then nothing until I got home 8 hours later, it was totally irrational as well to expect a normal person to be comfortable being forced to eat immediately after getting to work and then suffering almost the entire length of the work day.
Luckily they agreed and the few of us on seconds got to eat between 3 and 4. I have no qualms in going to the Labor Board to complain, I did it once before and the company had to go through its records for the previous 7 years, calculate teh nonpaid overtime then track the people down to get them their missing pay - almsot $100000 worth of pay! :eek:
At the time of employment, both of my friends were minors, so that law did apply to them, making their employers’ strategies illegal. (Sorry, I should’ve been more explicit in the post earlier.)
Does anyone know what it is in NC? I worked at a Borders here for a couple of months, and even when I wanted to skip my break because I wasn’t tired, they made me take on. 4 hours equaled 15 minute break half way through, and 8 hours equaled 15 minute + 30 min meal at appropriate time. I liked that job, but it was not exactly going to pan out into a career or anything.
Something like that is probably a company policy, not a state law.
Found it.
http://www.nclabor.com/wh/fact%20sheets/breaks.htm
It basically says that for a non-profit place, or a place that makes less then $500k/yr there is a mandatory 30 minute break for employees 16 and under. If your older then 16 or if you work in a place that makes more then $500k per year (regardless of age) there is no break required at all.
The reason for the forced break was two fold, most likely. First, you’ll work better if you’re not on your feet all day (though for some people it’s the opposite, once they get out of the work mindset, they might have a hard time getting back to work). Two, If you work an 8 hour day, they only have to pay you for 7.5 hours (or 7.25 depending on how the 15 min break counted in). I’ll bet they didn’t allow overtime either, did they?
Something else I just thought of. I was just out shopping for a new punch clock and I found something interesting that a lot of the software driven ones did. If you take a break for longer then a half hour, it would put the time in correctly. But if you punched out for your break at 2:00 and punched back in at say 2:11 it would change it to 2:30, or whatever you set your break length to be.