Change in Lunch Regulation Is Pulled

The administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday withdrew proposed labor rules that critics complained would have made it harder for workers to take lunch breaks and collect back wages.

The administration acted just as the rules were about to be put into effect on an emergency basis by the Office of Administrative Law, an agency that vets regulations to ensure that they’re needed and correctly drafted.

“I guess they blinked,” said Barry Broad, a lobbyist with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

The rules would have changed the criteria people follow to file complaints with state regulators about being deprived of proper lunch breaks on the job.

As it is now, an employer has to give an employee a 30-minute break after the worker has put in five hours. The rules would have in effect stretched that to six hours.

The rules also would have eliminated employees’ ability to file claims about incidents more than a year old. In addition, it would have become harder for workers to collect the attorneys’ fees, costs, interest, waiting time penalties and large monetary awards that all had been bolstered in a law signed by former Gov. Gray Davis in 2000.

By moving on an emergency basis, the administration would have had the rules go into effect before public hearings on them were scheduled.

Now, hearings will be held in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Fresno over the next 120 days and then the Labor and Workforce Development Agency will decide whether to put the rules on the books.

That will give opponents the opportunity “to organize around this issue and to explain to people that this administration would like to cancel lunch,” Broad said.

The episode was one of several over the last year in which Schwarzenegger administration officials have quietly pushed a policy change only to draw back when it was made public.

Earlier this year, Schwarzenegger reversed his administration’s attempt to save $14 million by shortening the period animal shelters are required to hold stray dogs and cats before destroying them. That came in response to a public outcry over the administration’s intentions.

Rick Rice, an assistant secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, said that the administration decided to change tack because the agency had received so much written comment, much of it critical.

The administration said this month that it wanted to overhaul the lunch regulations to clarify interpretations of state labor law, which have led to numerous lawsuits against employers.

The changes were needed to give workers more flexibility about when they could take lunch breaks, the administration said in a statement issued on Dec. 10 when the proposed regulations were released.