🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
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(UK) Foodbank set up as not-for-profit thinks that it doesn't have to pay bills. Closes due to debt.
(The fact that foodbanks in the UK are a bad idea anyway is by-the-by.)
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They are going to teach management classes to help generate revenue...
Let that sink in...an organization that ran itself bankrupt in record time...is going to teach management courses. Holy...shit...
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Having a "Commodities Editor" ( ) who cannot read graphs or know his subject..
(Article is not required reading - you can get the jist from the URL. Posted 23rd Jan.)
Graph (source).
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Someone not terribly literate might look at the sudden change in the trend line and go "well, it stopped falling. That's a kind of rise."
Gas prices in Dallas shot up about 20 cents overnight.
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http://www.adamsmith.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lunchbreak-640x300.jpg
Or rather, the action being performed in that picture is illegal in California. It’s not that the lettuce is not organic or anything. It’s that it is evidence of someone working during their lunch break:
The problem was that my workers needed extra money, and so begged me to be able to work through lunch so they could earn a half-hour more pay each day. They said they would sign a paper saying they had agreed to this. Little did I know that this was a strategy devised by a local attorney who understood meal break litigation better than I. What he knew, but I didn’t, was that based on new case law, a company had to get the employee’s signature every day, not just once, to avoid the meal break penalties.
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It's illegal to eat while doing work unless you sign a piece of paper every day?
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It's illegal to eat while doing work unless you sign a piece of paper every day?
That is, apparently, the essence of the law, yup.
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How do we know he's working during lunch break rather than having lunch during work hours?
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How do we know he's working during lunch break rather than having lunch during work hours?
Because if they're at their desk, they're presumed to be working. Or something. Ergo, if they're eating, they're doing it while working.
That said I think the pic was a bit of a piss-take.
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I know because once I tried to change my brakes and left some air on the system. It wasn't funny.
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Or maybe she's eating while watching some videos or reading a novel or
Also, I could be eating and watching TV since I work with TVs how do they know I'm not UAT while eating/watching TV?
Legislators are dumb.
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"Fucking $Mistress - 10:05pm - 10:17pm"
12 minutes?
That includes the time to eat the pizza, yes?
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And the chips.
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It's illegal to eat while doing work unless you sign a piece of paper every day?
Somewhere, a Scrooge abused his employees and made them work while they ate. Then a law was passed to protect the workers. A new was born.
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It's illegal to eat while doing work unless you sign a piece of paper every day?
It's "intended" to protect workers from being forced to skip breaks. The practical effect, though, is that you can't let your workers work through lunch or they'll sue you. You should click through to the Coyote Blog article: he talks about how California employees are working with laywers trying to find ways to abuse the rules to sue, instead of working.
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Yeah, in the very broadest sense, the concept makes sense: you shouldn't force people to skip meals to get more work out of them. But they went overboard legislating it, presumably because employers were forcing employees to assert that they were "voluntarily" giving up their break so they removed the ability to even voluntarily give it up. Personally, I never stop working to eat (and I don't live in California), but it's a thorny problem: how can you be sure someone's really volunteering to give up their break?
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How do we know he's working during lunch break rather than having lunch during work hours?
Well, the convenient thing is it doesn't matter. You are required by law to have a lunch break. Some workers asked to work through lunch to get paid extra. Then one sued the business, even though they were signing something saying it was their idea.
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That said I think the pic was a bit of a piss-take.
The picture was added by the adamsmith.org blog; it wasn't in the original blog post.
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You are required by law to have a lunch break.
Technically what I do is take my lunch break adjacent to leaving for the day and go off-premises for "lunch". Not sure if that'd be allowed in CA, probably not
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The picture was added by the adamsmith.org blog;
As was the comment referring to it...
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What he knew, but I didn’t, was that based on new case law, a company had to get the employee’s signature every day, not just once, to avoid the meal break penalties.
I wasn't sure if this belongs in the evil ideas thread or the "Road to Hell" thread, but then:
It's "intended" to protect workers from being forced to skip breaks. The practical effect, though, is that you can't let your workers work through lunch or they'll sue you.
Definitely Road to Hell thread.
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Also, I could be eating and watching TV since I work with TVs how do they know I'm not UAT while eating/watching TV?
They don't know, nor do they care.
I've been reading Coyote Blog for years. At one point he mentioned his unemployment insurance costs in California were triple what they were in every other state--10 or so--he operates in (heck, he mentions that in this post) because of widespread fraud. A couple years ago he called up the fraud department to talk to them about it, and said once they figured out that he wanted to talk about employee fraud, they got downright hostile and told him if he couldn't prove it, the state could sue him or something.
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you shouldn't force people to skip meals to get more work out of them.
As far as I know, you aren't legally allowed to do that anywhere in the US. In Massachusetts we were told hourly employees are entitled to 5 minutes per hour of break time, but that you're not automatically entitled to a break if you work less than IIRC 4 hours at one time.
No matter how the law is worded, people in California kept suing businesses.
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Technically what I do is take my lunch break adjacent to leaving for the day and go off-premises for "lunch".
The place I work has an explicit rule that you are not allowed to skip lunch and go home early. Given the company's based in New Jersey I expect it's either to avoid running afoul of laws, or else just part of a fairly outdated "everyone's got to be in the office 8-5" mentality.
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As was the comment referring to it...
I didn't know if you clicked through or not. I'd already seen the original post a couple days ago, so I was surprised when I saw something I recognized.
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hourly employees
Hourly and salaried have very different requirements IIRC. I used to have the rules memorized when my husband was working retail in North Carolina, they were very similar to what you quote.
The place I work has an explicit rule
I'd hate that :/ We allow a number of reasonable shifts, like 10-7 for nightingales or 6-3 for larks, so my 8-4 doesn't raise eyebrows.
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Definitely Road to Hell thread.
It's both, tbh, if you read the whole thing. This isn't the first time he's mentioned lawyers meeting with his employees, looking for ways to sue. It's a lot like the lawyers who pay disabled people commissions in NYC and Florida to trawl for ADA violations. Those scum should be kneecapped. I worked in a place once that took the trash cans out of the parking garage because of them.
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The practical effect, though, is that you can't let your workers work through lunch or they'll sue you.
You can't even let them be around their work area.
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I'd hate that :/ We allow a number of reasonable shifts, like 10-7 for nightingales or 6-3 for larks, so my 8-4 doesn't raise eyebrows.
We have a certain amount of flexibility in that I could work 8-5 or 9-6 or possibly even 7-3 or something. What you can't do is work 8 hours straight without lunch.
I don't know how well it would actually be enforced, but I don't really mind, because as I've said plenty of times before I live so close to work I go home for lunch every day anyway: I get a break and exercise when I walk the dog.
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The place I work has an explicit rule that you are not allowed to skip lunch and go home early. Given the company's based in New Jersey I expect it's either to avoid running afoul of laws, or else just part of a fairly outdated "everyone's got to be in the office 8-5" mentality.
I did this for a year and a half, but something changed and I can't anymore :(
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You can't even let them be around their work area.
I don't recall whether Coyote mentioned that or not, but it light of the whole thing it seems a reasonable restriction for the employer to enforce. (Or put up a video camera to prove they're not working.)
Coyote Blog's interesting except for his obsessive devotion to open borders and inability to see any possible reason to not allow unrestricted immigration except that white people opposed to it must hate brown people. (That's not really an exaggeration.)
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" However, after 2009 when a lot of younger folks were losing their traditional jobs, they began applying to our company. Our work force shifted younger, which actually excited me because I felt it would help us in attracting a younger demographic to the campgrounds we operate. But all eight of these legal actions were by these new, younger employees. I asked one person who was suing us over what was a trivial slight, really a misunderstanding, why they did not just call me (my personal number is in their employee handbook) to fix it. They said that if I had fixed it, they would have lost the opportunity to sue."
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As far as I know, you aren't legally allowed to do that anywhere in the US.
There is no federal law on the subject. They are all state laws. In our state, technically you could be asked to work 16 hours and only have one brea . IIRC, our state is a break every 8 hours. Which is just stupid. If that is the law, then why bother?
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I don't recall whether Coyote mentioned that or not, but it light of the whole thing it seems a reasonable restriction for the employer to enforce
This is one of the things I remember from my HR course in college.
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Technically what I do is take my lunch break adjacent to leaving for the day and go off-premises for "lunch". Not sure if that'd be allowed in CA, probably not
Over here the law is 'you cannot work for more than 5 hours consecutively'. There can't be more than 5 hours on either side of the lunch break. But if your day is shorter than some amount (5.5 hours, IIRC) the lunch break is not required.
There's separate rules on situations in which a second (dinner) break is mandatory, which I think has higher standards (must be able to have a hot meal? I'd have to look it up.)
Also, lunch/dinner has to be in a separate room.
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There's separate rules on situations in which a second (dinner) break is mandatory, which I think has higher standards (must be able to have a hot meal? I'd have to look it up.)
Sounds like it might be shading into busybodyism a bit: "must be able to have a hot meal?" What if I like cold pizza
More seriously, a microwave and a refrigerator/freezer should be enough for the company to comply with most reasonable rules.
Also, lunch/dinner has to be in a separate room.
With certain mindsets, like the antisocial California ones mentioned upthread, this is a smart idea. You can't work in the kitchen (modulo people who carry their laptop in, of course, but company policy can cover that.)
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Sounds like it might be shading into busybodyism a bit: "must be able to have a hot meal?" What if I like cold pizza
More seriously, a microwave and a refrigerator/freezer should be enough for the company to comply with most reasonable rules.
Be able to. As mentioned, I'd have to look up the details, and it definitely only applies to extremely-long shifts, not to irregular hours. If you work 2pm-11pm your employer definitely not required to give you dinner-level break facilities.
On the couple of occasions when we've had evening calls in the office, we arranged for pizza delivery (expensed).
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Next:
Missing off the final letterAdding an extraS
fromTaylor and Sons
S
toTaylor and Son
.
Edit - tad ironic I made the same mistake... :(
My excuse is that I hadn't had any coffee at the time. Dunno about Companies House though...
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I just got an email addressed to ceasstudents-all@uwm.edu titled "Re: Passing of a Student"
Here's a representative line:
CONFIDENTIAL -DO NOT FORWARD
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Make woman suit from her skin - 10:45 - 11:00 friday
Pick up hunky guy in poorly-lit club - 11:00-11:30 friday
Make man suit from his skin - 11:30-12:00 friday
Pick up new girlfriend - 2:00-6:00 saturday
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So what jucy details were contained within?! Don't leave us hanging, man!
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I won't screenshot the original email in the chain (the one that said not to forward it) but I wouldn't be surprised if a certain fair and balanced news organization had the scoop.
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Oh shit. I interpreted "passing" as in pass/fail, as in class grades.
/me puts foot into mouth
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Screenshot of email sent to cebutttudents-all@uwm.edu
Dude, you could have at least anonymized the names, emails and phone number.
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You've got mail!
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Good god...at least they're pushing back.