Hours
Meal period
Meal period is the break during a shift, generally one hour unpaid for an eight-hour day unless a different lawful arrangement is written.
How it works
A 15-minute ‘eat at the keyboard’ habit is not a meal period. Night seats still eat. Do not count the meal as NSD time if they were off tools. Timekeeping should show the break. For a U.S. company hiring one Filipino teammate, write this into the brief, the employment contract, and the peso payroll file before the start date. Slack habits do not override the Labor Code, BIR, or NPC. If the local employer of record holds the paper, they run the statutory step; you still owe a clean operating definition so the seat does not fail in week three. Put a number on the example when you budget loaded cost, because a nameless allowance always returns as a December surprise or a missed SLA.
Example: graveyard 10 p.m.-7 a.m. with a 2-3 a.m. meal. NSD applies to worked hours, not the off-tools hour.
How it differs
Undertime is missing scheduled work. Hours of work is the eight. Timekeeping is the log.
Common errors
Skipping meals to ‘catch up’ and then claiming OT on the same stretch.
In practice
Treat Meal period as a week-one operating object. Write the hours and the next Philippine holiday on the same page as the job brief. If this word would change pay or coverage that week, lock it before the interview. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have meal period yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.