Citation: I can't bill my customers for my lunch cause that's fraud. They don't pay me to eat. My employer provides no lunch charge number that I can charge overhead to.
Anyways, it's obvious that every employer has different policies for different things. "My employer doesn't give me disability insurance, citation needed yours does." (And mine does, I don't know how common that is)
Having anecdotes on both sides makes that "most" claim non-obvious and unsubstantiated. Now, if GP had led with "In my experience," that would be different.
Don't you have workplace laws which require breaks from using a computer all day? Those breaks are by law paid. Whether you have lunch on top of those breaks or not I don't care.
In the US, "salaried" is not a legally meaningful designation of employment. The term that applies here is "exempt". Workers who are paid by the hour and are "non-exempt".
Exempt employees (i.e. "salaried" workers in the US) are not paid by the hour and, so, it does not matter if they eat lunch for 6 hours, code for 1, and sleep for 2.
Their remuneration has no relationship to the length of their lunch breaks nor to the length of hours they code, are in meetings, take water cooler breaks, etc.
So, if you've worked in a salaried position in the US, it is true "Lunch was never considered to be paid time" but only because for all exempt employees neither is coding/meeting/managing/planning/napping considered to be paid time.
In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work.
You can use all the legal definitions you want (which, btw, I already knew all about exempt vs non-exempt employees). When did I say "salaried" was a "legally meaningful designation of employment"? No one I know uses "exempt" in casual conversation to describe what kind of employee they are. It's always "hourly" or "salaried" (or "on salary").
The point was that basically every place I've ever worked on a salary, you were expected to work at least 40 hours a week (that's the minimum). Yes, legally they are required to pay you your salary if you work less than 40 hours in a week. However, if you tried to get away with just working 35 hours, pretty much every place I've ever worked would call you on it, and if you didn't adjust you'd lose your job. They may not use "not working enough hours" as your reason for termination (they'd probably say something like "not getting enough work done"), but the real reason would be because you weren't putting in your 40.
So you can say "In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work.", and that is technically true, but the practical side of it is, if you don't work the minimum number of hours your employer expects, you won't have a job, so you'll stop getting paid at all.
There is a case where "In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work." is practically relevant -- when you work more than 40 hours a week. You will not be paid more for working more than 40 hours in a week. It's one of the downsides of being a salaried employee. But you put up with it because almost all of the higher paying jobs in the US are salaried positions.
While it is technically true that a salaried employee working 35 hours a week and taking an hourly lunch is not getting a "paid lunch", that is the way most people I know would describe it. People are geared to think of the work week as being 40 hours or more, and I'm sure that's why they'd describe 35 hours of actual work a week (with hour lunch breaks) as a salaried position with a "paid lunch".
Like I said originally, perhaps this is regional. I've only worked in the Midwest, but as far as I can tell, this is the way everyone I know perceives it.
Even service jobs occasionally give paid lunch hours. When salaried, the whole point is you don't need to track hours. Otherwise you need to bill for that 5 minutes of insight in the shower on Sunday when you have an idea that solves some important business problem. Anyway since I'm generally thinking about work related problems during lunch, frequently even eating at my desk, and lunch rarely takes a full hour, I've always considered my "lunch hour" as part of the total work day, and never had anyone higher up question it.
>When salaried, the whole point is you don't need to track hours.
Ummm... Keeping track of where man-hours is spent is good project management. Even when I worked jobs where I wasn't billing customers directly and my work was for the company's internal use I've always had to document where my hours were spent every day.
I can't imagine a project that doesn't keep track of man hours. Even if informally.
>Otherwise you need to bill for that 5 minutes of insight in the shower on Sunday when you have an idea that solves some important business problem.
Anecdotal, but I'm in exactly that situation at a fairly large tech employer. We log hours against different projects, are expected to log 40 hours a week, and are specifically instructed not to log anything for a non-working lunch.
Billing clients or projects per hour is like billing lines of code. It's a metric that doesn't correlate to real productivity as much as some people think.
Billings and pay rate basis are parts of a large lie in business.
Revenues are based on customer value, supplier costs, and relative bargaining positions between the two, which moves the balance between the two. The party that can't walk away is the party that loses.
Pay needs to similarly compensate for the provisioning cost of labour, fully accounted.
If you're not paying your employees what theey need to survive and raise families, you're not creating wealth but are extracting liquidity. How you pay isn't terribly significant, though bad bases, such as piecework, are often long-term harmful.
Marginal cost and value are, I'm increasingly convinced, in many ways a distraction. Not entirely, but they confound the matter.
Guy named Smith had a lot to say on this a ways back.
Umm, I'm here in Austin in a salaried position, work 40 hours per week, lunch doesn't count. If I work 9-5, and take a one hour lunch, that means I would have to work 9-6.
I don't know if this is an Oregon thing or national, but I believe that employers are required to give employees a paid 15 minute break for every 4 hours of work. So, at least a paid half hour break per 8 hour day is mandatory.
