Paid and unpaid breaks are among the most misunderstood areas of employment law. Who gets breaks, who doesn’t, and why? In this article, William R. Pokorny, a partner in the Chicago law firm Franczek Radelet, offers employers guidance on this topic.

Whose rules are they? First, Pokorny stresses, remember that no federal law, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), decrees that employees must be given breaks, no matter how many continuous hours they work. Instead, such breaks are matters of either state law or employer policy or both.

For example, Illinois’s One Day Rest in Seven Act, or ODRISA, requires that most nonexempt employees be given at least a 20-minute break after 5 hours’ work in a workday lasting 7.5 hours. For hotel cleaning employees, those breaks are paid, while they are unpaid for other workers. In Massachusetts, by contrast, such paid breaks apply to most employees.

According to interpretations by the federal Department of Labor, Pokorny notes, breaks of 20 minutes or less are usually paid: They are seen as refreshing productivity aids for employees, thus benefiting employers. They can be used for smoking, coffee, a snack, or just resting. By contrast, a meal or other break of at least 30 minutes is generally unpaid. Remember that the issue of paid breaks arises only with nonexempt employees; exempt workers may be generally instructed to work 7.5- or 8-hour days from which a meal break is subtracted, but they must be paid for a full day when they do any work on a given day.

All in all, 20 states and many corporations require that employees get time off work to eat a meal. And that doesn’t include California, which has some of the nation’s most generous employee policies: In that state, workers must be given a 30-minute break after 5 hours of work.

’What if I don’t want a break?’ As it turns out, uncompensated meal breaks are a frequent basis for class action lawsuits. Tens of thousands of suits have been filed in the last decade under either the FLSA or one or another state law. Sometimes, conscientious employees deliberately skip the break in order to catch up on their work.

But more often, plaintiffs say, an employer prevents them from taking the break. It is automatically deducted from their clocked-in hours by the employer’s timekeeping system, when the workers often can’t take the break. This is a common occurrence in healthcare facilities where patients’ needs are constant and in a variety of other industries where work backs up.

And, the laws are strict: If a meal break is unpaid, the employee must be able to leave his or her workstation and have that time uninterrupted. The hard and fast rule is that nonexempt employees must be paid for all hours worked. Pokorny strongly advises against timekeeping systems that automatically deduct such breaks.