Mississippi Lunch Law
Posted by Tamara
Mississippi employers may legally require their employees to work 8, 10, or 16 hours a day without a lunch break.
There are 19 states in the U.S. that mandate meal breaks for most employees. Mississippi, however, is not one of them. There is no federal protection either. No federal law requires employers to provide meal breaks.
The U.S. Department of Transportation demands meal breaks for workers in some occupations. Airline pilots and interstate truckers, for example, must take breaks. This is a public safety law rather than a worker-protection law, however. Among OSHA’s regulations is one that requires management to give employees bathroom breaks when necessary, but no OSHA law mandates meal breaks.
While no Mississippi law requires a lunch break, employers may turn the tables and require their employees to clock out for mealtime. Employers may, for example, demand that workers clock out for a 30-minute or 60-minute break on each shift. Mississippi employers commonly use this method to save on payroll costs. Employees who do not comply face discipline or even firing.
Working an employee without a meal break is not a practice recommended by the Human Resources profession, even though it is entirely legal to do so. In the Human Resources field, the best practice is to grant workers a 30-minute unpaid lunch break plus one or two paid rest breaks of 10 to 15 minutes long each. This is the recommended standard for an eight-hour shift.
This pattern of lunch plus breaks is actually found to increase employee productivity. Workers who take these scheduled breaks produce more during the workday than employees who do not. The findings stand even when the paid rest breaks are factored in as work time. Nevertheless, there is no law requiring meal breaks.
The 19 states that have laws mandating employers to grant meal breaks include West Virginia, Washington, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Nevada, Nebraska, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Connecticut, Colorado, and Illinois. The lunch breaks are required for almost every employee in the applicable states. Unless employees live in one of the 19 states they are not protected by lunch break laws.
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