Q. My employer automatically deducts an hour of pay per shift from our paychecks whether we take our meal breaks or not. Is that legal? Can the employer make lunch breaks mandatory?

A. I checked with the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations about this question and have two answers for you.

According to the Wage Standards Division, the law states that the employer has to pay an employee for all the time worked. That means if you work through your lunch break, you should get paid for it.

That said, your employer has the right to set the rules of the workplace and if you're supposed to take a lunch break and refuse to do it, it becomes a disciplinary issue.

If you refuse to take your lunch break — and force your employer to pay you for the extra hour — it's within your employer's right to take disciplinary action, including termination.

The advice from the Labor and Industrial Relations Department is to sit down with your employer and see if you can find a compromise, since good employees can be hard to come by. For example, you might suggest taking a half-hour lunch break and leaving a half-hour earlier or starting a half-hour later.

Q. As of early 2007, the landscaping between the Kaonohi Overpass and the Pearl City off-ramp on the H-1 Freeway 'ewa-bound was beautiful! The grass was green and weed-free, and all the palms and shrubs that were planted looked healthy.

Now, there are a lot of weeds in the grass area, and the plants and shrubs look very sickly. What happened to the maintenance of this area?

Did the state DOT fall asleep? Is no one caring for this area? I'm sure it must have cost a lot to install all the landscaping. Is this another waste of taxpayer money?

A. According to Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Ishikawa, the landscaping work was done in conjunction with the H-1 Freeway widening project.

"When the area, including the landscaping, was handed over to state jurisdiction earlier this year, no funding was immediately available to take care of the new landscaping," Ishikawa said.

It took two months for the Transportation Department to get the additional funding needed for the landscaping, but it became available last month.

According to Ishikawa, the funding covers a six-month extension to Paradise Landscaping, the contractor presently maintaining the area.