Legal Question in Employment Law in California

Your employer is confusing two different rules. The five hour rule is the threshold for when a meal break must be provided. It does not say when in the shift it has to be provided, only that if the shift is less than five hours no meal break is mandated, and if it is five hours or more, a meal break IS mandatory. The rule on WHEN the break must be provided is much less clear. Last I checked there is no official Dept. of Industrial Relations rule on when the break must be given, only cases in which abusing the timing of the break have been held to be denial of the break. The situations in which that has happened, however, have been the opposite of yours. Employers would work their employees for 8 hours straight, then have them clock out on their break, and go home and the employer would clock them back in and out a half hour later, or would work the employees 7.5 hours straight, give them the break and then work them .5 hours more. Things like that have been ruled illegal. Given those rulings, your employer is not required, but is certainly prudent to require that the break be taken somewhere in the middle of the shift and before 5 hours of straight work. On the other hand, if they are not permitting you to take it near the middle of the shift, and instead are requiring you to take it as soon as you clock in, that would almost certainly be found to be a denial of the break just as when it is tacked on at the end. One last point is that the employer is not required anymore to make sure employees take the break, only to allow it. So if your employer would not penalize you for taking your break near the middle of the shift, and would allow it, they are entitled to expect you to handle your work flow to take the break around mid-shift. In other words, if the employer really controls your work such that you are not permitted to take a mid-shift meal break, they are probably in violation. But if you just feel like you cannot conveniently take the break unless it is right after you clock in, but in fact the employer would permit you to take it mid-shift, it is probably not a violation.