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Michigan Smoking Breaks

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How many smoking breaks is an employer in Michigan legally required to give an employee, per day?

None. To clarify, there is no federal or state law that requires any Michigan business to provide employees a smoke break.

No federal or state law exists that mandates employers to provide workers over 18 with any break at all, lunch or otherwise. A business is legally able to ask employees to work as long as 12 hours without lunch or a break of any kind.

Union contracts sometimes set conditions for breaks, but in the absence of a contract, most companies have a policy of two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch break per 8 hour shift. Workers are within their rights to smoke during these breaks. The company isn’t required to provide any additional time to smoke outside of these breaks.

Though they aren’t required to do so, many companies have policies regarding smoking breaks. Employees are asked to keep smoking breaks to 5 or 10 minutes, and to 5 or less during the day. Often these break time limits are put into writing, but not always.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 requires businesses to pay workers for breaks lasting less than 20 minutes. The Act also requires employees be paid for any break where they can be called to return to work. A worker taking a smoke break is actually requesting to be paid for time away from his or her work station. If you add up the time spent away, an employee taking 10 minutes for a smoke break 5 times a day is actually getting paid for 50 minutes of not working.

Even in states that do require one or two work breaks per shift, there are no legal provisions for additional smoking breaks.

That’s almost an hour out of an eight hour shift not spent working. The employer could legally request that a worker clock out for a smoke break and take a 20 minute unpaid break. Few companies do, though, because they would have to provide the same types of breaks for nonsmokers.

The bottom line is that a company has the right to define limits for smoking breaks, including banning them all together. Workers who receive paid smoking breaks would be smart to adhere to their company’s smoking policies. JH