Meal and Rest Breaks

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Hospitals and other medical service providers continue to face waves of wage-and-hour claims concerning meal break practices, with non-exempt care providers alleging that they were unable to take unpaid meal periods, or that those meal periods were otherwise compensable.  A new decision from Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejects…

Confronting a novel issue of state law in the wake of the California Supreme Court’s 2012 decision addressing California’s meal-and-rest break requirements, an appellate panel of the California Court of Appeal’s Second District ruled that a security firm did not violate rest break requirements where its security guards were “on call” during the required…

Per FLSA regulations, break periods between 5 to 20 minutes generally are considered compensable.  29 C.F.R. § 785.18.  While state wage-and-hour laws typically borrow extensively from the FLSA’s regulatory framework, a new decision from a Missouri Federal Judge highlights that many of the vagaries of state law are unsettled or unclear, rejecting Plaintiffs’ motion for…

In 2010, the FLSA was amended to require covered employers to provide a time and place for nursing mothers who are non-exempt employees to express breast milk. In the first appellate decision interpreting the provision (29 U.S.C. § 207(r)(1)), the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has ruled that an employee who was…

As previously reported here, the recent Health Care Reform legislation includes a provision, which became effective immediately upon passage of the Act, requiring employers to provide breaks for employees to express milk for nursing children.  The USDOL issued a fact sheet this week explaining its view of an employer’s obligations under this enactment.  The…

On March 23, President Obama signed a bill which amended the FLSA to require most covered employers to provide breaks to mothers for the purposes of breastfeeding (as well as furnish private space for them to do so).  While the new law does not require that nursing mothers be paid for such break time, state law may. …

Over the past year or so, employers in the health care industry, particularly in the Northeast, have been – and continue to be – targeted in a number of lawsuits alleging improper payment of hours worked by their hourly employees. Specifically, these lawsuits allege that certain health care facilities automatically deducted time for meal breaks, even when an employee worked through the meal period. Several of the lawsuits also include claims for unpaid pre- and post-shift work, as well as unpaid training time. The lawsuits seek back wages, interest, attorneys’ fees, and liquidated (double) damages.

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), most employees must be paid at least the minimum wage (currently $7.25 per hour) for all hours worked and must be paid one-and-one-half times the “regular rate of pay” for all hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a workweek. Under the FLSA, bona fide meal periods do not count as “hours worked.” Ordinarily, 30 minutes or more is long enough for a bona fide meal period, although meal periods of less than 30 minutes in which the employee is completely relieved from duty for the purpose of eating may be bona fide under certain conditions. Factors to be considered in determining whether a meal period is bona fide include, among others, whether the employees have sufficient time to eat a regular meal, whether there are work-related interruptions to the meal period, and whether the employees have agreed to the shorter period. Meal periods of less than 20 minutes should be especially scrutinized to ensure that the time is sufficient to eat a regular meal under the circumstances.

Many employers automatically deduct a 30-minute lunch period from an employee’s total daily time worked. Typically, such deductions are made unless the employee notifies the employer that he or she did not take a 30-minute lunch period that day. This practice generally is permissible under the FLSA, provided that the employer accurately records actual hours worked, including any work performed during the lunch period (and accurately compensates the employee for the actual hours worked).Continue Reading Time to Eat? Health Care Employers Should Make Sure There Is