I’m not really mad about this, I just think it’s asinine.
I work as a bartender at a hotel that was just acquired by a new company. I don’t work enough to qualify for benefits, so the only thing that has visibly changed for me is the clocking-in process and break times.
Apparently it’s a rule that if you work 6 hours you have to take a 30-minute break. I don’t know what happens if you don’t take a break. Someone gets penalized?
But I’m a bartender, and 6 hours into our shift it’s usually still busy. Usually my coworkers and I trade off a quick few minutes to eat, and that’s always been fine, but there’s weird rules now.
To get around this break thing, the opener comes in at 4pm and finishes setting up by 4:30, takes a break, and is ready to start serving at 5:00 when the bar opens. The closer comes in at 5:00pm and takes a break at 5:30 when it’s still a little slow. You can’t take a break until you’ve worked 30 minutes I guess.
Except it doesn’t make sense and sometimes the closer can’t take the break right away. The other day my coworker took his 30 minute break in a slow moment around 7pm, but out of nowhere I got slammed. When he got back he said if he’d known I was slammed he would have been there, but the thing is we clock out for breaks and the punch-in machine literally will not let you clock in until 30 minutes have passed. I once tried to punch in at 29 minutes and it wouldn’t clock me back in. I would never want my coworker to be working off the clock, so I wouldn’t have let him help anyway until he could clock back in.
Anyway, it’s stupid. It doesn’t hinder me much, but it’s some corporate bullshit that I don’t see the point in mandating. It’s almost impossible to run the bar with only one person, so on my own I was running around like crazy. And course if someone needs to take their break later rather than sooner, the manager is nowhere to be found to help manage the bar at that time. No night managers that I know of. They tend to leave around 6pm.