Legal Industry News

Beware the Meal Period Time-Bomb

Source: Federal Employment Law Articles
An increasing number of federal Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits and U.S. Labor Department investigations include claims based upon the employer’s deducting meal periods from non-exempt employees’ recorded worktimes. Typically, the employees did not clock out-and-in to reflect the mealtime they took. Instead, the employers automatically deducted the full, scheduled meal period from each employee’s total daily hours on the assumption that the person took a full meal break each workday. An employee who worked during a meal could avoid the deduction by using an exception feature of the timekeeping system, but the usual allegation is that employees did so inconsistently or infrequently, if ever.

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