When working full-time, it is often legally required to have employees take their scheduled breaks.

What would you do if your new boss put a policy in place that made it impossible for people to take breaks?

That is what happened to the team in this story, so the supervisor told the employees to call the new boss at home for every break, which quickly put an end to the policy.

Check it out.

Boss said we needed permission from him to take a break during our shift…

Many moons ago, I worked at a residential treatment center doing direct care with teens.

While in most jobs breaks are a built in and guaranteed part of the work day, this was not the case here.

We had compliance concerns around mandatory staff to client ratios and this often made it difficult, sometimes impossible to get a break during your shift.

That being said most of us working the line had a pretty good system worked out for trying to get folks a break.

That sounds like a good system.

If we happened to notice that all of the kids and staff were present on the unit at the same time we’d have someone take a break and then hold off on moving on with programming until they had returned.

After working there for approximately 2 years the guy who ran the residential unit was let go for stealing from the clients (real nice guy).

At this point they hired a new guy to take over.

He had not worked at our agency before, he had not ever done direct care himself before, but he did have experience in administrative positions in agencies similar to ours.

He came in as most administrators do that have no experience of the job and thought he knew best about everything.

Pretty quickly he became concerned that we were talking advantage of taking breaks throughout the day.

(which could not have been further from the truth, again most days you were lucky if you got 1 break at all, and that includes while working double shifts).

So, he came up with the plan that in order to take a break you needed his permission.

Not a big deal.

During the day time when he was present at the unit this was not a huge deal as you could simply walk over and ask him.

This immediately became a problem however for staff working evening, overnight and weekend shifts who would need to call him to get permission.

Anywho I’m someone who is always up for following the rules, so during my first shift (I was shift supervisor and therefore responsible for the other staff working during my shifts) I asked everyone to please do as he had asked.

By the end of that first shift not one person had gotten a break.

Each time we had an opportunity ratio wise we’d give him a call… which he wouldn’t answer.

Did he just not want people taking breaks?

By the time he called back 30 minutes to an hour later, the opportunity was gone.

When I showed up the next day I explained to him what had happened the previous evening and asked him to reconsider.

He refused.

So, I did what any logical person would do.

It is only what he asked for.

I told my staff to call him when they wanted a break, and if he didn’t answer they were to call again and again until we reached him.

He probably received upwards of 40 phone calls that shift (I should note, of which he answered none).

Sadly this did not result in any of us getting a break that night, but by the time I showed up for my shift the next day we had an email from him letting us know that we no longer needed to call him and get his permission for breaks.

How could he not have known how this would backfire?

Let’s see what the people in the comments say about it.

Apparently other jobs have tried this.

Here’s a good idea.

I’m pretty sure there are laws about this.

This would have solved the problem.

Yeah, that is unfortunate.

What a terrible policy.

At least the manager wised up eventually.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.