I am a boss. (I don’t think I’m cut out for it, but right now I don’t see any other way around it.) Like most bosses, I have employees. They rock. They rule. They are, in the current vernacular, the shit. So as long as they get their work done, I don’t care when, what or if they eat. That’s their business.
When we all worked for someone else (I was their boss then, too), none of us ever took a traditional lunch break. (I know what the law is, blah, blah, but my guys were and are very flexible and understanding.) If we ate at all, one of us would grab a few bucks out of an orange plastic pumpkin full of cash that I kept filled as our “slush-fund”, and run down the street for take-out sandwiches. We mostly ate at our desks, but man, did we get a lot of work done!! Nobody complained because we were all in it together.
Then one day, in unison, we went, “Hey, let’s blow this joint and make money for ourselves! Then if we work 12-hour days with no lunch, we’ll have only ourselves to blame for any stress-related illness!” So we did. Now if we take lunch we go to a cool restaurant and have fun. We still have working lunches, but now we only take jobs that we want. We drink bourbon during meetings (well, okay, I do). We’re on our own time. And we get to talk about excellent subjects like the the lady who recently found a nice crunchy chicken head in her Kentucky Fried order. Hope she wasn’t charged extra.
My employer is somewhat flexible but not utterly. Lunch does not count as part of your 40 hours, but you must take a lunch break. You can make it a 1/2 hour lunch rather than a 1-hr lunch if you so choose, but you can’t choose to not have any lunch break altogether.
I think it’s sort of an enforced health/sanity thing. It’s not in their interest to have people “working through lunch” (or skipping lunch) to get home earlier. I think there would be health and burnout issues if that happened every day.
Yeah, but it’s different at my company. Lunch breaks aren’t required; in fact, due to the asocial atmosphere, they are tacitly discouraged.
If a company requires lunch breaks, that’s one thing. However, if they don’t, then they have no business forbidding people from counting work performed during lunch hour. That policy makes no bloody sense.