California Department of Industrial Relations Withdraws Proposed Meal Period Regulations
On January 13, 2006, the Department of Industrial Relations (“DIR”) announced it would withdraw the proposed revisions to meal period regulations that had been pending for more than a year. The revisions would have given employees the option to decide whether or not to take a thirty-minute meal break and would have clarified the issue of the statute of limitations for penalties assessed to employers for violations of the meal break regulations. The DIR has indicated it will issue new proposed regulations at a later date.
Summary and History of Proposed Regulations
In December 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger announced new meal break regulations that would have required employers to inform all hourly employees either in writing or verbally of their right to take a thirty-minute meal break and to afford employees the opportunity to take a meal period. Under the current regulations, employers are required not only to make the meal period available to employees, but also to make sure all employees actually take a thirty-minute break. Accordingly, employers currently can be penalized when employees do not take their meal breaks, even if the employee voluntarily chooses not to take one.
The proposed regulations further specified that recovery by employees for missed meal periods should be classified as a penalty rather than back wages. If classified as a penalty, aggrieved employees would be able to recover for missed meal periods going back one year. If classified as a wage, employees would be able to seek three years of back wages for missed meal periods. In a recent press release, John Rea, the acting director of the DIR noted that this issue has already been reviewed by the First District Court of Appeal (which found that the payment is a penalty and not a wage) and that “the need for a regulation clarifying that the ‘payment’ is a penalty and not a wage is significantly reduced at this time.”
The proposed regulations met with strong opposition from labor unions and other employee rights groups, who argued that employers would bully employees into not taking their meal breaks. The DIR indicated that it received hundreds of opinions of the proposed rules and wanted additional time to consider the comments before acting.
Conclusion
Although the DIR has indicated it will revisit the meal period regulations at a later date, it is likely that any proposed regulations will not go into effect until 2007 at the earliest. Accordingly, employers should continue to ensure that all hourly employees take their legally-mandated meal periods.