Short lunch breaks

janart · January 2003

We require all employees working over 6 hours to take a 1/2 hour unpaid lunch. Our payroll system is set up that if the employee does not punch out for lunch, 1/2 hour is automatically deducted from their time. Some employees are not able to take a full 1/2 hour for lunch, depending on their job duties, and so they will punch in and out for their lunch (if they punch out for 15 minutes, they will only be deducted 15 minutes). Our problem is that some other employees are following their hard-working co-workers lead and are punching out for lunch and then back in a few minutes later, and then they resume their lunch break (and are getting paid for it). A few managers have then edited punches to round to 1/2 hour. How do we best stop this problem? We have several timeclocks located throughout our property.

Gillian · January 2003

Progressive corrective action - a counseling, verbal warning, final warning and goodby. This is the process but you might want to start at a verbal or written warning because they are really stealing money from the company. Decide how hard nosed you want to be. It won't take long to stop the practice.

Christinet · January 2003

I agree with Gillian, however it appears there is another problem with your current system.

We just went through a wage and hour audit & I was made aware that lunch breaks cannot be deducted if they last less than 20 minutes. In other words, your employees that punch out for only 15 minutes must be paid for that break. Of course, I am speaking of non-exempt employees only.

Pork · January 2003

Paying time contained on a company time card is an HR function, if the HR controls the payroll function. I make sure every manager knows what the rules are and we pay according to the time cards turned into us for record keeping.

The actual use of a time clock and is routine maintenance is an operations funtions and a supervisor responsibility with in any company where I have been employed.

Once you get this frame work established the problem is diverted to the responsible party, the operations group, regardless of the location of the time clock system. I make sure they understand it is their choice to use a time clock, we in payroll/HR can use a manual paper drill to get the pay checks done. The management of their responsibility for time keeping is their call. I promise to make sure we in HR/payroll will get their employees paid, but we do not and will not get involved with how they get the time on the job recorded.

Hope this helps! Pork

Rockie · January 2003

Some of our employees take 30 minute lunches and some take one hour lunches, depending on which area they work in. Anyone taking less than 30 minutes, is considered a break which is paid time. Always, there is abuse of the system from some folks. Probably the biggest way to cure this is to take an automatic 30 minutes out for lunch (or whatever time you give). If someone does not take lunch, then they must explain to their manager or supervisor why they didn't take lunch. If they took a "short" lunch,then they must also explain.

We ask that people take a lunch break if possible. If we are short staffed and people have to eat on the run occasionally,then we understand. If someone is constantly not taking lunch, they are either consistently working through lunch (which is bad) or they are stealing time (double bad). In either case, it puts the case of an explanation on the employee. Please are "oh, so creative" when it comes to milking the clock!

Short lunch breaks

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