If you don’t get a break and you make a mistake that injures or kills you or someone else, the employer is responsible.
If you “don’t get” a break, either by force or voluntarily (the reason actually doesn’t matter), then many places consider that to be… For lack of a better description (my brain can’t think of one right now): bad working conditions, and illegal.
Even if you voluntarily skip you break/lunch, the thin line between that being fine, or a problem for the company, is whether you want to hire a lawyer and make it a problem or not.
That’s liability that they don’t want.
I guarantee they couldn’t give any less of a shit whether you take your lunch/breaks or not, except for the fact that it could affect them.
I’m thankful for this, because bluntly, otherwise, they just wouldn’t give you a break at all.
They would put it on the books as you working a 9 hour shift, and taking your lunch at the end of the day, but tell you that you are on an 8 hour shift that has no breaks. Since they can’t cover their ass like that, you get an unpaid lunch.
The unpaid part was the compromise to get the legislation passed so they don’t subject workers to inhumane conditions. Remember that the government is largely comprised of, or paid for by, businesses and business owners. So if it isn’t, at the very least “fair” to business owners, it’s not going to pass.
There’s also the problem that if your coworkers skip theirs voluntarily, then you feel pressured to do the same and it’s no longer voluntary. Breaks and lunch are legally required because otherwise you just don’t get them at all because of the legal murkiness you mention.
When I worked at Target about a decade ago, if you missed your break, YOU got written up. They’d been sued so many times for not giving breaks that they FORCED you to take a break or be written up for it. If you were within 10 minutes of working into your lunch break, you can bet your ass someone was on a walkie talkie telling you to get your ass out and stop working. At the time they loved 4h45m shifts because it gave them 15 minutes buffer before you had to take a lunch.
Yeah thats my job. If you have an incident and we check your vehicle logs and you arent taking your breaks its an automatic write up. Because nationally its been proven that drivers who DO take their breaks have less incidents.
There’s all kinds of legal murk with this.
If you don’t get a break and you make a mistake that injures or kills you or someone else, the employer is responsible.
If you “don’t get” a break, either by force or voluntarily (the reason actually doesn’t matter), then many places consider that to be… For lack of a better description (my brain can’t think of one right now): bad working conditions, and illegal.
Even if you voluntarily skip you break/lunch, the thin line between that being fine, or a problem for the company, is whether you want to hire a lawyer and make it a problem or not.
That’s liability that they don’t want.
I guarantee they couldn’t give any less of a shit whether you take your lunch/breaks or not, except for the fact that it could affect them.
I’m thankful for this, because bluntly, otherwise, they just wouldn’t give you a break at all. They would put it on the books as you working a 9 hour shift, and taking your lunch at the end of the day, but tell you that you are on an 8 hour shift that has no breaks. Since they can’t cover their ass like that, you get an unpaid lunch.
The unpaid part was the compromise to get the legislation passed so they don’t subject workers to inhumane conditions. Remember that the government is largely comprised of, or paid for by, businesses and business owners. So if it isn’t, at the very least “fair” to business owners, it’s not going to pass.
There’s also the problem that if your coworkers skip theirs voluntarily, then you feel pressured to do the same and it’s no longer voluntary. Breaks and lunch are legally required because otherwise you just don’t get them at all because of the legal murkiness you mention.
When I worked at Target about a decade ago, if you missed your break, YOU got written up. They’d been sued so many times for not giving breaks that they FORCED you to take a break or be written up for it. If you were within 10 minutes of working into your lunch break, you can bet your ass someone was on a walkie talkie telling you to get your ass out and stop working. At the time they loved 4h45m shifts because it gave them 15 minutes buffer before you had to take a lunch.
Yeah thats my job. If you have an incident and we check your vehicle logs and you arent taking your breaks its an automatic write up. Because nationally its been proven that drivers who DO take their breaks have less incidents.