Break policies

A break policy holds the break rules of one jurisdiction together with the settings that act on all of them: how a person’s work is grouped into shifts, days or stretches, which breaks count, whether breaks must be punched, how closely recorded breaks are checked, and whether a missed break owes extra pay. A work policy picks one break policy, and many work policies can share it. A rule can belong to several break policies at once, so a law change is one edit.

Every new company gets a break policy for its country, named after it — for example “Switzerland” — and its default work policy picks it. Companies in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy and the UK also get a “Youth” break policy, picked by the separate “Youth” work policy. US federal law requires no breaks, so a US company starts without one: the states and territories that do require breaks ship as packs you can start a policy from.