You always hear the phase “9 to 5” and also the song with the same name. Assuming you include 1 hour worth of breaks (30 minute lunch and two 15 minute breaks), you’re only working for 7 hours a day which comes up to 35 hours a week.
Now it feels like you have to work 8 hours a day (for a total of 40 hours of actual work), plus your other time off meaning you’re really there for 9 hours each day (for a total of 45 hours). Am i looking at that wrong, or did expected times change, and if so, when?
if someone tried to dictate the amount of work hours that I put in during the day I would just start puking and shitting
I’m pretty sure it’s in your contract of employment
not if you’re a wizard
It depends on where you are and whether you join a union or not. Labor laws vary by state and by country. Paid lunches and breaks may or may not be part of your employment contract.
Everything changed. You’re not crazy. If you watch movies made before the 2000s about office culture, including the movie 9 to 5, you can see that the hours included a lunch break. Which was paid.
Yes, those of the older generation had it easier in every way.
Those old tv shows where they casually eat breakfast before work make more sense. They weren’t up at 6, rushing to get to work by 8. They had a whole hour more.
They also had someone to make it for them. One income was enough for the household.
Is this a US thing? Do you not get paid for your lunch hour? That’s wild.
I work 10’s and we get 2 paid 20 minute breaks that are actually usually 25-30 depending on how caught up we all are individually since they let you walk away early if you’re caught up and how long after you get up, go to the bathroom, get some coffee , put your stuff up.
They’re actually pretty chill as long as you stay caught up
Ha! Hour. You’re funny. Federal law only gives half an hour.
Ha! Nah, Federal law doesn’t require a lunch period, or breaks, at all. It’s all state side.
Only thing is that if an employer gives a short break, like 5-20 mins, it must be paid and included in overtime.
Spaniard here. Not only does my company not pay me for lunch time. It also demands it to be at least 30 minutes long. How is it even legal to force my unpaid time to be a minimum amount?
It’s probably a law. Mandatory minimum breaks make perfect sense for factory workers.
They should be paid though
Most people don’t. So, for an average employee, it would be 9-530 to account for their unpaid 30m lunch required by law.
I believe many places lunch is not required, and neither is any limit on number of hours per day required.
In the US, you’re lucky if you get paid for the hours you work. And many don’t get all of their hours paid.
In the US, it’s Salary, not Hourly. It’s not “getting paid for the time”, you get paid for doing the job you agreed to do.
No. Some jobs are hourly and some are salary.
That’s just salaried folks though. The vast majority of american workers are hourly or contractors. Per the Dept of Labor’s own site:
The Wage and Hour Division is dedicated to protecting and enhancing the welfare of the nation’s workforce with a focus on low-wage, underserved workers. In fiscal year 2023, we successfully recovered over $274 million in back wages and damages for more than 163,000 workers nationwide.
Wage theft is when employers don’t properly pay their employees and is a HUGE problem because it isn’t always out of malevolence, it can be as simple as the time clock not properly computing overtime, etc.
If you don’t think that $274 million is large amount, think about how the vast majority of these things never get reported to the authorities; that number should be higher.
Source for quote: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data
Most salaried workers are written up if they fail to work 8+ hours. Salaried is now just a method to deny people overtime - fancied salaried workers may still operate in the intended way but even most developers I know have to obey some sort of time tracking method.
Same in Germany, I think this common in many countries, no?
For the record, lunch time is not considered paid time in Sweden either.
I live in Canada. We get a half-hour lunch that isn’t paid in my province.
Also, if you take more than 3 sick days a year, your boss can fire you. And the 3 sick days are unpaid. The government lowered the number from 10 to 3 shortly before the pandemic, and didn’t raise it again! Oh, and to count, your boss can demand a doctor’s note. Which cost money to the patient.
Where do you live, Alberta? Or one of the maritimes??
It’s Ontario! aka. Open for (Big) Business. No longer “Yours to Discover” because it’s all been sold off.
Sounds like Ontario 🙃
That really sounds like one of the flat-lander regions.
I get 21 holidays a year, not counting every second friday off because of my 9x9 compressed-time agreement. If I plan it right, and hit the stats with the comp days, that’s 7 weeks off a year. Why, that’s almost european. I’ve just finished my first year at this shop.
Is that by law, or what your employer offers? Because I’m talking about what the law requires.
That’s so toxic! I get an hour long paid lunch break, and a bunch of paid sick days. Your work’s policies are shit, I’m so sorry!
It’s not my work’s policies. I get better than that. It’s what my province legally mandates that’s the problem.
Oh shit, sorry! I’m so happy you get better than that. Those are garbage mandates that predatory businesses for sure take advantage of. I hope your stuff is as good (ideally better) than mine.
It doesn’t affect me but my work also rolled out months of paternity leave which is BAAAAASED
Thank you.
I definitely agree with businesses doing right by their employees. I just wish the governments would be doing more to protect ALL employees. I vote based on which parties are looking out for everyone, not based on whatever works best for me because I’ve got better than the legal minimum.
Damn, Canada is becoming less and less a viable escape plan from American fascism…
There might still be some decent provinces.
But yeah, I blame brain drain, cuts to the education system, and the influence of American culture! Haha
Depends on the state, in my state you legally have to get paid for 30 minute lunches but not hour long lunches. No idea why but because of this most office jobs will give you an hour lunch in addition to your mandated 2, 10 minute breaks.
Honestly I would love to just take a 30 minute break and get out earlier. It’s not even about the money.
Where do you get paid for your lunch hour? I’m in Germany and while work life balance is certainly a thing here, more so than in the US, a paid lunch break is something I have never heard about.
You get paid for lunch? Where is that? We don’t either in Switzerland
In Spain, if you work more than 6h you have at least a 15 minutes break that almost always is paid. But people usually work 5 or 6h, 1 or 2 hours for lunch (not paid), then the rest.
Ah that’s interesting, thanks.
Here in Switzerland if a shift is longer than 5.5 hours it needs to have at minimum 15min unpaid break for lunch by law. Longer than 7 hours means 30min unpaid lunch and longer than 9 hours means an hour unpaid lunch by law. Additionally if the split is uneaven such that the period before or after lunch is over 5.5 hours, then you recursively get another break following the above rule by law. But these are all unpaid and do not count as hours worked.
The usual reality for typical 8.2 h/d office jobs is that people take half an hour to an hour of lunch, unpaid, and companies allow two 15 min paid coffee breaks, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, despite not being forced to by law.
The unpaid break is also the same in the general work law (Estatuto de los Trabajadores) but professions get extra laws that apply to them (convenio del metal, convenio de farmacia, etc) where they can go better than the general law, and most ‘convenio’ pay for that 15 min break. Lunch time? Never paid unless you agree directly with your company, but some nice companies (I don’t have numbers but in my experience in the IT industry may be around 30% of them) give you 10-12€ a day to help pay your lunch or they have cafeterias where you eat for 4 or 5€.
Ah yes we have some general contracts for whole sectors as well that ususally contain better conditions (called Gesamtarbeitsvertrag GAV).
My workplace, also IT, also gives 180 Swiss Franks a month to help with lunch (much appreciated in Zürich, shit’s expensive). There are some tax rules concerning workplaces either offering cafeterias or lunch subsidies. I believe 180 is the most they can give you before it counts as a separate form of reportable income that needs to be taxed. I think this is common for office jobs, but I also don’t have hard numbers.
Typically no but my current employer pays us for 1/2 of our 1 hour lunch.
Is the part about being able to socialize also a mythic fantasy? Where ever do people work that they find the time to have conversations?
Having worked in a couple of European countries, I thought 7.5 hours of work plus a half an hour lunch break is the norm everywhere in the western world. So the 9 to 5 did totally make sense to me. I was honestly surprised reading all these comments.
Here in America I work 7.5 with two 15 minute paid breaks and a half hour unpaid lunch. So it’s really more like 8:30-5
Nevermind the world. Even here in Europe in Switzerland the standard is somehow 42 hours a week.
In Spain it’s 40h a week maximum but to explain it simply there are 2 ways to go higher: 1. some professions can go higher as long as they compensate later the same year (the total maximum hours are anually, not weekly). 2.up to 80h a year on extra hours that need to be paid.
That said, that’s what the law says but many people do extra hours without getting paid and people do not sue for a few hours a year.There are various exceptions in Switzerland too, I think the weekly maximum if going over your contract is 50h and that can either be paid with 25% extra, or compensated by free time in another week. And then even this maximum can be surpassed by another 2h/d, for a real max of 60h, if there is exceptional work that needs to be done, also paid with 25% extra, or compensated by free time in another week.
It seems a little complicated to me, lukily I haven’t really had to deal with those protections in the law yet, since my workplace is pretty sensible overall.
Yes. And if you interview for an 8 to 5 job, you tell them that it sounds like a crock of shit and you don’t want the job.
So sick of that shit. Fuck any employer who pulls this shit.
I don’t WANT your crock of shit job! I’ll go live on the streets!!! I’ll give blowjobs for $20! And hey…you want a blowjob? Got $20?
I think i would just not apply if i felt like you do
Employers don’t usually broadly advertise their anti-perks. This is the kind of thing you usually discover with a question during an interview or when you’re handed your employment contract.
Crock of shit or no, a man’s gotta eat. That’s kind of how we got into this problem in the first place. They have a captive audience.
I guess it depends on the company. Mine clearly expects us to work on 37.5 hours per week whether you work non stop from 9 to 4.30 or from 7 to 7 with many long breaks. And any overtime I do during the week makes my day at work on Friday that much shorter.
Hour long mandatory lunch, no pay. Switzerland.
Switzerland is more like 8-11 12-18. Atleast for me. So more 8-6 than 9-5.
Half an hour mandatory lunch, paid. Austria.
(pretty much depends on your job a bit, just wanted to continue with the same comment style)
Oh shit I need to go pester my family to let me be a citizen (or recheck and go talk to an EU focused immigration lawyer to discuss where exactly in Europe my family was when to see if I qualify)
I am 51. When I started working my job was 9-5 with a one hour lunch an unofficial 30 minute coffee break and about four unofficial ten minute smoke breaks.
What’s it like for you now?
My company went full time “work from home” in 2012 and we are specialists that are only brought in when everyone else has fucked up. So basically, I am on call 24/7/365.
This actually doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
I didn’t think it was. For IT, it was a dead end job, so I couldn’t stay.
Retired in a 3-bedroom home paid off that was purchased for $57,000.
/kidding
You’re thinking boomer so you are off by ~20 years.
All my jobs have either been 9-5 or 9:30-5:30 with an hour lunch included. TBH I’ve never tracked my pay by the hour, just the day.
It’s one of those ambiguous things that employers seem to be leveraging to their advantage. Where I work, plenty of people do 8-5. Those of us who have been around longer and don’t give as much of a shit will count lunch as part of our day.
You’re thinking small-time, like an hourly worker. Good office jobs are generally salaried positions and the idea of clocking in and out is… not a thing. Some days you work more, some less, whatever needs to be done. The idea of 9-5 is just a general time frame. And no one gives a shit when you lunch or break. In a real profession the yardstick is, are you getting it done or not?
I’ll catch grief for saying that, so I’ll preempt by saying, if your job isn’t like that, you likely have a shit job.
Gentle reminder that without “small time”, hourly workers doing real labor your easy, sweatless, office job would disappear overnight. Perhaps some gratitude? Maybe even some solidarity?
As a former IT professional turned baker, I dislike the condescending attitude too many white collar workers have toward the actual wheel turners of the world.
I’ve done it all, from shoveling asphalt to dishpits to customer service, all that and a dozen more. Guess what? Those were shit jobs. Doesn’t make the person doing those jobs shit.
Some of y’all are so eager to be offended it’s ridiculous.
If you want solidarity you need to stop shitting on office workers first. You’re lambasting your own behaviour with this comment. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…
“doing real labor” “easy, sweatless, office job” “the actual wheel turners”
“I dislike the condescending attitude”
It never ceases to amaze me how often people see and hate shit in other people that they epitomize themselves.
And honestly, my experience has been the opposite and I see the condescending attitude, at least more openly, coming from blue collar workers more often.
I’m a capitalist and this thread is giving me a hard-on
I was waiting for the /s the whole time, that comment read like a joke but I think it was actually sincere…
At the end, we just all want to get paid. And UBI doesn’t exist yet.
Tell me more about this “some days you work less” concept. It’s completely foreign to me
Those would be Fridays at my last job. Swear to god no one did anything unless absolutely necessary and most were gone by mid-afternoon. LOL, which sucked because that’s when I was often jamming along and no one was around to help, question, etc.
If your job has you grinding non-stop, that’s no way to live and a good employer recognizes that.
Tell me.more about this “good employer” concept. That’s completely foreign to me
I have a salaried position. I don’t clock in. But it’s typically only used to deny us overtime pay. If I work 35 hours a week, I’m paid 12.5% less than my colleagues who do 40. And if my lunch break is too long, I’m expected to stay late sometime within the month to compensate.
And while I do have a shit job (save me) I’ve never seen someone whose employer didn’t mind their hours as long as they got shit done.
You cannot be salaried and deducted hours you don’t work.
Either you are hourly, and paid for the hours you actually work, or you’re salaried, and paid regardless of how many hours you work.
What your employer is doing is illegal, and wage theft.
This is so common in Quebec that I have trouble believing it’s illegal. I think it might be a loophole.
Or they do it anyway and hope they just won’t get caught.
And even if they do get caught, the likely punishment is just paying out the wages they owe, so why not chance it? Fines don’t scale based on revenue, profit, or even damages, if there even are fines.
How do they know when you’re not working your full 40 if you aren’t clocking in or out? I’m not familiar with Canadian labor law so you may very well be right, but it is kind of hard to imagine a legal pay structure where they can dock you for working fewer hours but don’t compensate you for working more.
Friendly reminder that wage theft is very common and just because lots of people are breaking the law doesn’t mean it’s actually legal. For example in the States, there is a fairly narrow definition of which jobs qualify as overtime exempt but go to a jobs board and you’ll find pretty much anything under the sun. Many employees are incorrectly classified as exempt and are completely unaware they are even entitled to overtime pay.
Well they don’t know know, but there are signs. For one, we fill in timesheets, and lying on them is a no-no. I could probably get away with stretching the truth a little, but if they notice I only commit between X and Y time, or that I’m seldom available for developer questions at a particular time, they might get suspicious and investigate my hours.
As for overtime… Well I think how companies handle it is they don’t actually ask us to stay late; they just give us unrealistic targets that kinda require overtime unless you’re a god if we ever complained they’d say they never asked for us to stay late.
We used to be able to accumulate time indefinitely and take time off according to the bank of extra time we’d worked, but once, someone accumulated hundreds of hours and just left on an unplanned vacation for nearly a full month and they really didn’t like that. So now, you need to work your quota (which you can have them adjust to your capabilities; 30, 35, 40…) on average every month. So, sure, I can work only 20 hours one week, but that’s 15 hours of extra time I need to do within that month.
And if you have extra at the end of the month, well, that’s lost.
Which sucks, because I used to use those as sick days over the legally required two paid ones we get per year; my health isn’t exactly resplendent.
You cannot be salaried and deducted hours you don’t work.
You would think that. And yet, the US… Finds a way. I’d rather not doxx myself by getting into it further, but it’s definitely not illegal where I am.
Not illegal, as in you’ve actually gone through this with a lawyer, or not illegal, as in your company does it anyway?
Because Federally, being salaried does not work like you describe: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17g-overtime-salary
Working less hours in a day is not valid reason to deduct pay. Working less full days is. (From the source above)
State law does not trump federal law, unless explicitly called out. It’s just that federal law is actually pretty lax regarding most things and states are more restrictive.
Mine doesn’t give a fuck how long we work.
You’re not an exempt (salaried) employee if they deduct your pay for working less in a given week. I’ve never had an employer who cared about hours as long as work got done.
As others have said, I’m in the “put time in, get shit done” camp.
Provided I deliver a job well done, my bosses don’t give a fuck what or how many hours I clock per week.
I used to work at an engineering firm and one day I saw one of the engineers leave at like 2pm on a Wednesday and he was like, “Bye, see you next week!” He had been busting his ass to finish a project and already hit his 40hrs for the week.
I was a temp at the time but needless to say, I jumped at the chance when they offered me a real job.
Lolol what kind of fantasy world do you live in? Salaried worker here and although my job isn’t 9-5 strictly if I don’t work at least 40 hours a week my pay will be docked. So I get to choose between 8-5 or 9-6 or I can work while I eat and get that cushy 9-5 life. Or if I miss work I can make up those hours by working at night. It’s a real luxury to be able to do that compared to shift work, but the hours are still being counted.
Also stop being so entitled. Most of your life necessities come from industries (groceries, power plants, gas stations, hospitals, etc) where people work on a timecard/shift basis so don’t you come out here and pretend timecard or shift work isn’t a “real” profession.
the hours are still being counted
Refer to my last sentence. And you will note that I didn’t denigrate anyone’s work, only that if they’re on the clock, the job probably sucks.
Me laughing in salaried 9-5 with clock in and clock out. Pay deduction if i forget to do clock in or out even if everyone know i work that day. Got paid 50% less than people who did the same job same position who didn’t need to clock in/out.
I have a shit job and the only thing that keep me going is the job close to where i and my family live so i can check on my sister (found out that she do self harm once and I’m scared to go faraway from her ever since).
Desperate people make a good cheap employee.
I’m desperate ATM. Looking at a crappy onsite tech support role, no benefits, just to get by while I keep looking.
I’m “salaried,” and union, but they 100% track our hours and if you use up your benefit time and take additional time off, you will not get paid.
So I’m not even completely sure how they can even call it salary. Like… Maybe I’ve misunderstood the meaning of that word my entire life?
My time sheet totals 37.5 hours of work per week and I can take take a lunch break of 30 to 60 minutes. The break is unpaid and a minimum break of 30 minutes is required after 5 straight hours of work so the lunch break is mandatory.
Typically this works out to 7.5 hours work with a 30 minutes break totalling 8 hours on site. Smaller breaks are untimed so if we need to stretch our legs or get some fresh air no one is watching the clock. We also have a pretty good culture of not interrupting people’s lunch with work issues so that does feel like an actual break.
Different jobs are different
Sorry for rambling
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Yeah, I think the 9-5 mentality comes from a time when men would spend most of the day socializing, drinking, and sexually harassing the secretary. Back then the boys would go to lunch whenever and leave the work to the nerds and the women.
I get as many coffee breaks in the office as I want but it’s not like I get up, grab a cup and then play on my phone while I drink my coffee for 15 minutes. I get up, grab a cup, maybe say hi to someone as it brews an instant cup, then go back to my desk and drink while I am working. But no one is shadowing down my neck saying I can’t leave my desk until 10:15 and I need to be back by 10:30 or my pay is docked. Freedom and responsibility rather than strict time management and punishment.
We need to strike for slow coffee machines. These instant pots are a tool of oppression!
You’re making coffee in an instant pot? Tell me more!
Your math ain’t mathing.
The stereotypical “9 to 5” is an 8 hour shift with a paid hour “lunch break”. This includes two 10-15 minute breaks, which are also paid. You come to work at 9, do work, take breaks, take lunch, and then leave at 5. That’s 8 hours.
My job is 8 to 430. I come in at 8, work till 12, then I have a half hour unpaid lunch. The unpaid lunch means I cannot be required to stay on site, which can happen with a paid lunch. Then from 1230 to 430 I work until I go home. There are two 10 minute paid breaks in there. I work 8 hours total in an 8.5 hour work day.
