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Unpaid lunch
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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In a lot of states it’s illegal for workers to work too many consecutive hours without a break, especially if it’s a physical labor job. Your employer may legally not be able to allow this.
Though sometimes they are just petty and inflexible.
And that's actually a good thing because once you allow this it's easy for employers to pressure you into "voluntarily" not taking a break, because "it's so busy right now" or whatever.
That’s when I say “hahaha no”, write it down as a request. Then, when yearly evaluations comes along, I write into my evaluation so it’s on the record
Wait, you are sometimes asked to skip lunch?!
This is less common than you think, and gets pretty hazy pretty fast where it is true.
The real reason is payroll and accounting.
If you leave an hour early to take your lunch, it looks like you only worked 7 hours.
Could this be fixed? Probably. But accountants are notoriously salty about anything that threatens to crack the mold.
8-4 is still 8 hours?
The average work day is 8-5 with an unpaid lunch break.
8-4 to your payroll people is 8 hours less a lunch break. Because they expect you took it and went home early.
Again it's not something that can't be fixed, and I'm sure once in a while it would be fine. But a bunch of people doing it all the time probably causes enough extra work to need to hire someone just to take care of it.
The most unreasonably rigid people you've ever met will work in accounting and payroll.
In my timesheets, when I work is logged and automatically calculated. If I put in 8am to 12pm. Then enter 1pm to 5pm, with a 1 hour gap for lunch it calculates 8 hours, if I put in 8am to 4pm, and have "lunch" at the end of the day, it still calculates 8 hours.
It's not illegal where I live but it's against my union rules (though it's not a labour job). They have super strict rules about exactly when we should take our breaks. I get it in principle because there are asshole bosses who would try to force people to work through their breaks or shame them into it, but it really sucks for those of us who just don't mind pushing through so we can leave early or like to take late lunches.
Yeah, that's one thing that sucks about union jobs. On the other hand, I'm no longer at a union job and can break/lunch whenever I want, but my boss can make unrealistic expectations and I have no way to argue if I can't get another manager in the line to back me up. My current workplace is very quickly turning into a shittty place to work since there isn't a union to push back.