[mistersquid]

In the US, "salaried" is not a legally meaningful designation of employment. The term that applies here is "exempt". Workers who are paid by the hour and are "non-exempt".

Exempt employees (i.e. "salaried" workers in the US) are not paid by the hour and, so, it does not matter if they eat lunch for 6 hours, code for 1, and sleep for 2.

Their remuneration has no relationship to the length of their lunch breaks nor to the length of hours they code, are in meetings, take water cooler breaks, etc.

So, if you've worked in a salaried position in the US, it is true "Lunch was never considered to be paid time" but only because for all exempt employees neither is coding/meeting/managing/planning/napping considered to be paid time.

In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work.

EDIT: spelling, capitalization.

[nocman]

You can use all the legal definitions you want (which, btw, I already knew all about exempt vs non-exempt employees). When did I say "salaried" was a "legally meaningful designation of employment"? No one I know uses "exempt" in casual conversation to describe what kind of employee they are. It's always "hourly" or "salaried" (or "on salary").

The point was that basically every place I've ever worked on a salary, you were expected to work at least 40 hours a week (that's the minimum). Yes, legally they are required to pay you your salary if you work less than 40 hours in a week. However, if you tried to get away with just working 35 hours, pretty much every place I've ever worked would call you on it, and if you didn't adjust you'd lose your job. They may not use "not working enough hours" as your reason for termination (they'd probably say something like "not getting enough work done"), but the real reason would be because you weren't putting in your 40.

So you can say "In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work.", and that is technically true, but the practical side of it is, if you don't work the minimum number of hours your employer expects, you won't have a job, so you'll stop getting paid at all.

There is a case where "In the US, exempt employees are remunerated irrespective of how many hours a week they work." is practically relevant -- when you work more than 40 hours a week. You will not be paid more for working more than 40 hours in a week. It's one of the downsides of being a salaried employee. But you put up with it because almost all of the higher paying jobs in the US are salaried positions.

While it is technically true that a salaried employee working 35 hours a week and taking an hourly lunch is not getting a "paid lunch", that is the way most people I know would describe it. People are geared to think of the work week as being 40 hours or more, and I'm sure that's why they'd describe 35 hours of actual work a week (with hour lunch breaks) as a salaried position with a "paid lunch".

Like I said originally, perhaps this is regional. I've only worked in the Midwest, but as far as I can tell, this is the way everyone I know perceives it.