Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Eat your lunch, comrade.
Interesting column on the bits of labor law related to lunchtimes in California along with some information on proposed rule changes. After many years of retail work in that great state, all I can say is that flexibility is good. As a matter of fact, it isn’t mentioned in the thing my own most frequent experience with the goofy lunchtime laws is that shifts just get shorter. In many settings it’s too much of a pain in the butt (or too expensive to have covering employees) to lunch everybody out in time, so they just make the shifts short enough so that you don’t have to take one. Kills your income pretty effectively. The tactic for waitstaff of having them come in early for their break is pretty popular too, as I understand it.
In any case, if you can’t kick the state out of the deal, then any flexibility they’re willing to give back to employers and hence employees will be a good thing. Speaking of which, the 40 hour week overtime rule instead of the 8 hour day was so damned nice…