Well, hiring a new employee IS a BIG thing, for a small business. When it's just you, labor laws mean diddly squat. As soon as you hire someone, you need a break policy, a lunch policy, a bunch of other policies, and you MUST enforce them. You have to set up a giant bulletin board to hold all the required notices to employees. And you just took on a whole buttload of new work, to make sure that you are recording things correctly and paying all the taxes for that employee. When a business gets large enough to have an HR person to write and administer those policies, and an accountant to handle the taxes, hiring another person isn't as bad. However, that HR person and the accountant are making good bucks and not contributing directly to your bottom line. Yet another hidden tax. Here is CA you MUST give lunches and breaks at the right time. You cannot allow the employee(s) to take them when they want, and you must force them to take the breaks. No working through and leaving early. Many businesses force the employees to leave the premises during lunch breaks, so that they cannot be accused of making the employee work on their break. Ever been sitting at lunch at work and have a customer ask you a question? If you answer it, it's a labor law violation for the business, and if you refuse, you get a pissed off customer. The solution is to make the employees leave. It sucks, but them's the rules.
