California is hitting companies hard when rest and meal breaks are not honored … or properly documented. Protect your company by handling breaks correctly.

Meal breaks must be at least 30 minutes and provided if your employee is scheduled to work more than five hours. However, if your employee is working no more than six hours the meal break can be skipped. Be sure that employee clocks out within the six-hour window though!

You absolutely want to record those meal breaks. If you use a time clock, have it well documented that employees must clock out for meal breaks and clock back in upon returning to work. If you use handwritten timecards, have the employee write in their meal breaks and initial each day (or weekly at a minimum).

Rest breaks are harder to document because employees don't clock out for them. So, again, make sure you put in writing your rules for 10 minute rest breaks every four hours. And don't ignore them yourself by not calculating work schedules to allow for them.

If you don't think this is serious, ask Rady Children's Hospital. They've had to pay nearly $2.8 million to compensate about 2,000 current and previous employees who didn't get a second meal break after working shifts of ten or more hours. And the whole case was started by one employee who complained to the DLSE (Division of Labor Standards Enforcement). The only reason the dollar amount was so little was because the DLSE could only go back three years.

The hospital actually thought they had done things correctly. They had gotten waivers from the employees who wanted to skip the second meal break so they could leave work half an hour early. However, the hospital didn't keep track of the records properly and lost their ability to fight the claim.

How are you tracking meal and rest breaks?