Meal and Rest Breaks: A Case Study
- Claire Baker
- Jan 17
- 5 min read
Every few years, a shocking news story comes out about the unfortunate effects of companies not granting their employees adequate meal and rest breaks. Whether it's a recall of contaminated produce or a warehouse worker forced to eliminate into a bottle because he can't step away from his position on the assembly line, the employer always winds up with egg on their face. Everyone understands the need for workers to be able to take breaks during their shift, but meeting those requirements in a dynamic business environment is easier said than done.
In states like New York and California that prescribe when these breaks fall within the shift, it can be even more complicated.
Case Study
The challenge comes when factors outside the employees' control affect when they can (and can't) take a break. Limiting factors may include unpredictable spikes in business or having only one person per shift that can do a certain type of task. In this case, a 1:1 service-based role had to accommodate the clients' availability.
The challenge comes when factors outside the employees' control affect when they can (and can't) take a break.
How it started
In an earlier stage of my career, I was a personal trainer in a nationwide fitness chain. My club was in California, a state notorious for having the most strict labor laws in the country. California requires "an uninterrupted 30-minute unpaid meal break when working more than five hours in a day" (source: CA DIR).
What makes meal breaks challenging?
During these high-demand times between 5am and 2pm, trainers face a lot of pressure from clients to sacrifice their required breaks to take on more sessions.
Trainers would accept make-up sessions in the gaps meant for meal or rest breaks because they were paid more if they met aggressive sales targets. This put the goals of the clients, trainers, and company in direct conflict with the regulations. Clients wanted to squeeze in a session at times that were convenient for them, the company wanted the revenue from the additional sessions, and trainers wanted the bonuses they could earn from a fully-booked schedule.
The goals of the clients, trainers, and company were in direct conflict with the regulations.
Outcome
Since trainers were responsible for their own schedules, HR put the obligation to meet the meal and rest break requirements on them. If the client in a fifth consecutive session wanted to chat after the session was over, we were supposed to interrupt the session to punch out before resuming the conversation. Failure to do so would result in a conversation with your manager or a nasty call from HR.
In response to unreasonable demands, employees began clocking in and out of shifts on the prescribed schedule, regardless of whether they were working or not.
In response to unreasonable demands, employees began clocking in and out of shifts on the prescribed schedule, regardless of whether they were working or not.
Subverting the rules like this exposed the company to much more liability than the violation it was meant to solve. It would have been easy to show the discrepancy between employees' actual work hours and their punches. Also, the problem was pervasive, undermining the company's position on any wage theft complaints. Furthermore, if a trainer had been injured during one of these "off-the-books" sessions, the company would have faced further complications related to worker's compensation.
I don't know the outcome of all of the labor complaints, but the company did settle more than one class action suit as a result.
Lesson
Policies with misaligned incentives are doomed to fail. The policy would have been more successful if the company had thought about ways to bring their competing goals of profitability and compliance into alignment before creating the policy.
Impact
Business practices like how the company enforced its meal and rest break policy earned the company a negative reputation in the industry. It was seen as a burnout factory, and the nastygrams and threats from HR further undermined trust between staff and the company.
Any trainer successful enough to make a living could earn more by taking their clients private, thus bleeding the club of revenue from its most dedicated members. Unsuccessful trainers would wash out all the time, leaving more "orphaned" clients than the veteran trainers had capacity for. Each time a trainer left, more of these warm leads turned to other facilities to find more reliable trainers.
Solution
Competing goals never have an easy solution.
Option 1: FLSA exemption
Consider whether an FLSA exemption is appropriate. If licensed trainers met the salary minimum and passed the “Learned Professionals” duties test, they could qualify as “exempt” from meal and rest break laws. At its core, the concept of an “exempt” employee was created to allow professionals with a certain level of expertise and responsibility to set their own schedules.
If the FLSA exemption applied, the company could create a program by which trainers with certain credentials could be promoted to “exempt” after proving they could consistently meet rigorous sales targets.
Option 2: Adjust the policies "upstream" from the problem
Members pressured trainers to take their only open slot because the cancellation policy meant that they would lose the (very pricey) session otherwise. Trainers felt obligated to bend the rules to maintain the relationships with their clients (and to meet their time-sensitive sales targets).
Raising the session prices slightly would have given the company more margin to give trainers credit for late-cancelled sessions while giving clients more margin for error. Under this system, people would have been less tempted to bend the rules.
Option 3: Additional checks
The company could have also protected its interests by having a neutral third party, such as a manager or scheduling assistant schedule the trainers' sessions. While this approach would have taken some adjustment, using a third party who didn't have a reason to circumvent the rules would have helped adherence. It would have also let someone else be "the bad guy" so the late cancellation rule didn't sour the relationship between client and trainer.
When I left, the company was releasing a mobile app that would let clients see their trainers' schedules and book or cancel sessions. While mobile apps weren't as sophisticated back then, a mobile app today could serve all the functions mentioned above without needing to pay a human to do it. By removing the barriers to following the policy, the app could have forced the intended behavior.
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Conclusion
Failure to consider labor laws as part of your overall People strategy can lead to legal, operational, and morale problems over time.
Employees forced to work around an unworkable system only expose the employer to more liability than the original problem they were trying to avoid.
Ignoring labor laws when you create your policies can hurt a company’s bottom line, souring company culture and causing more customers to leave.
A reanalysis of the company's goals, incentive structures, and available tools almost certainly would have reached a better result: increased profitability, lower churn, less employee turnover, and less legal risk.
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