This exact issue was decided in a U.S. Federal court about 18–20 years ago. If an employee does not get an uninterruted lunch break, be it 30 minutes or 60, the employee is entitled to full pay for the entire period. If an employee is on their lunch break, a manager walks by and asks a question related to the business, operations or not, the employee gets paid for the entire lunch. As a senior manager for a large healthcare company, we set policy and trained managers to have every employee take a full 35 minutes lunch, preferably away from the workplace, in the company cafeteria or department breakroom and all supervisors and above were trained not to engage the employees on any work related manner during that time. Non business related conversations such as sports interests, a family event, etc. were permissible. By the way, the most difficult challenge was the motivated emloyees that only wanted 15 minutes for lunch and wanted to return to the job too soon. So go ahead and engage the employee, I suspect the lawsuit woud win backpay for all lunches taken in a 2 year period ( the statutory limits of a civil action) as well as compensatory and punitive damages. So budget about 2 years salary for every employee you treat this way. Can I get an application?