Posted on 08-Feb-10 by The Timekeeper

According to an artile in the East Bay Express, many labor law firms are focusing on employee breaks as a lucrative target for wage and hour lawsuits.

For instance, in the case of Kassem v. Cypress in California, three security guards claim they were compelled to sign an “on-duty meal period agreement,” which forced them to stay on duty while eating lunch. Those who didn’t sign, didn’t receive job assignments.

Now, some employees might like the idea of working through lunch — after all, by getting rid of an unpaid half hour in the middle of the workday, it means you basically get an extra half hour of pay while still spending the same total number of hours away from home. On the other hand, if you’re expected to work during your lunch break, you seldom get an uninterrupted lunch… which lawyers and some workers claim is bad for worker health and safety. They say workers may need that time off during the day to refresh and rejuvenate mentally.

Even if employees sign an agreement to work through their meal breaks, unless the employer is careful, it’s easy for those agreements to be implemented in ways that violate labor laws.

Further problems can arise if the employer doesn’t require workers to work through lunch, but allows it to happen… while having a time and attendance system programmed to automatically deduct meal breaks from total hours worked. Unless you’re exceptionally vigilant at tracking when people work through lunch and putting those hours back into the system, you’ll find yourself in the situation of having employees who are working but not getting paid for the time.

According to lawyers who specialize in defending businesses against wage and hour claims, small businesses face special problems: the laws are complex, and it’s easy for even a well-intentioned employer to accidentally violate the rules. Beyond that, many small businesses don’t keep adequate records of employee work time to start with, which makes it especially hard for them to disprove claims against them.

Which, of course, leads me to my usual rant. After all, I do work in the time and attendance industry!

If you don’t have any formal time records, now is the time to implement a system. At the very least, have employees write out and sign a timesheet to document their work time. Better yet, install some kind of automatic time recorder, whether it’s a traditional punch clock or a software-based system or a web-based alternative. People can easily “fudge” their time on a handwritten time sheet, intentionally or unintentionally. Automatically punching their time using a clock or a computer or a data collection terminal removes the elements of faulty memory and sloppy penmanship from the equation.

And while you’re at it, schedule a consultation with your labor law attorney, just to make sure all your current pay practices are acceptable under the law.

With law firms going as far as posting ads on commuter busses and trains trying to recruit new clients to file wage and hour suits, it’s likely you’ll end up facing one sooner or later. These two things won’t necessarily get you out of the suit, but they can go a long way toward mitigating the damages.

So, what are your meal and break policies?

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