Short lunch breaks
janart
1 Post
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.
Comments
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.
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
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!