This meal period deal is driving me nuts. The workers on our assembly line usually work 6-hour shifts. Most of the crew want to work through the meal break, and we’d like that too—more productivity. But we have a few who insist on their meal break. And we can’t run the assembly line without the whole crew. Can we make the holdouts work the shift without a meal break? And what about the new rules I’ve been hearing about? Will they help me out?
Unfortunately, you cannot force employees to work shifts longer than 5 hours without providing a 30-minute break. If the shift is no more than 6 hours, the employer and the employee can agree that the employee will waive his or her meal period, but even under the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement’s (DLSE) new regulations that you reference, that waiver has to be by mutual consent.
However, employers can manage this situation in several ways. First, if you keep the shifts to 5 hours or less, you do not need to provide a meal break. Another option would be to stagger meal breaks so that a relief employee can cover each employee’s meal break individually. Finally, under the new regulations, the meal period need only be provided before the sixth hour of work is completed, so that once those regulations go into effect, you could schedule the employee’s meal period to begin after 5.5 hours of work and have the beginning of the next shift overlap the previous shift by 30 minutes to keep the line fully staffed. One word of caution: As I’m sure you know, retaliation against an employee for exercising his or her right to take a meal break is illegal, so don’t penalize or otherwise put pressure on employees who insist on taking their meal breaks.
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Sandra Rappaport is a partner at the San Francisco office of law firm Hanson, Bridgett, Marcus, Vlahos & Rudy.