I wrote the board and GM last week:

John, With regard to your official explanation of employee breaks, frankly, I still do not understand.

You wrote that some employees were taking their breaks in conjunction with lunch breaks; “thus, they were taking an hour off for lunch and the association was paying them for 40 hours when they were only working 37.5 hours.”

The following are some issues I do not fully understand. Perhaps the board does.

• Is the lunch break a half hour and are these employees paid for time during the lunch break or not?
• What are the other breaks they were taking with lunch breaks? Are there allocated break times in the morning and/or afternoon? If so, are those break times paid or unpaid, and what are the lengths of those breaks?
• If there are/were no allocated paid break times other than perhaps lunch, how could employees add non-paid break times to the lunch time, assuming the lunch time was paid break time?
• If there were paid break times other than perhaps a paid lunch break, what was the financial problem?
• Perhaps the HR employee was correct in that it would take 20 minutes to explain and I would not understand it anyway.
• If any board members reading this have a full understanding of this new implementation of an old policy, I would appreciate the explanation.

Joe Reynolds

 Todays I see a somewhat different version in the Ocean Pines Progress, and sent another email to the GM and board:

John, I am still hoping to obtain clarity with regard to the hourly employee break times.

I have seen no response to my questions in an earlier email, and I now see something in a local paper that adds additional confusion.

The paper states, “An informed source with knowledge of the change in the policy said that the old policy gave hourly employees an hour off for lunch, with half of it paid by the OPA. Under the new policy, hourly employees won’t get paid for any portion of the hour they are given for lunch.
Why is something that should be so simple to explain remain shrouded in confusion?

Answers to my questions would go a long way towards clarification.