Different lunch break duration

katy123

Hi

I was wondering if a company can offer one employee 30 mins lunch break and if another employee wanted say 1hr, is this okay? Obviously, the pay will be adjusted for the employee taking a longer lunch break, thanks.

Brie

of course - depends on their shifts, their contracts all sorts of things.  we've got people who work 7 hour days, some with 30 minute unpaid break and some with an hour.  Some have arranged to work split shifts so effectively have a 3 hour lunch break.  
As long as they are agreed and being treated fairly as well as within the law there's no issue.  Pain to manage though.

Sandtree

katy123 said:

Hi

I was wondering if a company can offer one employee 30 mins lunch break and if another employee wanted say 1hr, is this okay? Obviously, the pay will be adjusted for the employee taking a longer lunch break, thanks.

Its simply an unpaid break in a shift, or another way to look at it is you've two shifts in a day with a 30 or 60 minute gap between them.

When I was a teenager I used to work in a call centre a few doors down from the school and occasionally did a 6:00-8:00 shift followed by a 17:00-21:00 and so arguably had a 9 hour "lunch". 

Shift patterns are personal and other than a few industries where there are legal requirements for certain breaks a lunch can be 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 120 minutes or 540 minutes as per my case. It all comes down to your own agreement with the employer and to be honest, whichever you have there are times when you want the other... 30 minutes are too short when you need to go to the post office or such and 60 minutes can take forever to pass when its bad weather out and you've no errands to run.

Marcon

Brie said:

of course - depends on their shifts, their contracts all sorts of things.  we've got people who work 7 hour days, some with 30 minute unpaid break and some with an hour.  Some have arranged to work split shifts so effectively have a 3 hour lunch break.  
As long as they are agreed and being treated fairly as well as within the law there's no issue.  Pain to manage though.

Actually no requirement to treat 'fairly' (not least because that's a subjective assessment in many cases). Simply being agreed and within the law is all that's needed, although if objectively fair that's all to the good.