A meal period you worked through is time you have to be paid for.

You carried the phone. You answered a call light. You charted while eating standing up, or you never ate at all. The stub deducted thirty minutes anyway, because the timekeeping system deducts them automatically.

29 CFR 785.19 says a bona fide meal period is not worktime, and then defines the term: the employee must be completely relieved from duty for the purpose of eating a regular meal, ordinarily thirty minutes or more. It states directly that the employee is not relieved if she is required to perform any duties, whether active or inactive, while eating.

29 CFR 785.11 and 785.12 close the other door. Work that the employer did not request but suffered or permitted is still worktime, and it is the employer's duty to see that work is not performed if it does not want it performed. Not knowing is not a defence, and neither is a policy on paper that says breaks are protected.

The rate matters as much as the time. A meal period during a Saturday night shift is paid at base plus night plus weekend, not at base — and if the week is already over 40 hours, that half hour is overtime.

Three deducted lunches in one pay period is $68.25, and every one of those half hours also raises the total hours in the week — which can push the week past forty and change the overtime calculation as well.

Find total hours paid for the period, then count the shifts you worked and multiply by your scheduled length. Seven twelve-and-a-half hour shifts is 87.5 h. If the stub shows 84.0 h, seven half hours were deducted — and you know which of those breaks you actually got.

Write down the dates before you go further. A dispute over a meal period is a dispute about specific shifts, and the dates are the whole case: which shift, what you were doing, and why the break was not a break.