Short answer. Yes. Article 84 says in terms that rest periods of short duration during working hours shall be counted as hours worked. A short break is not carved out of your day and deducted from it — it forms part of the time on which your pay for that shift is computed.
What the law says
Rest periods of short duration during working hours shall be counted as hours worked.
Labor Code, Article 84 — What Counts As Hours Worked. Read the full provision →
What the law says
Hours worked shall include (a) all time during which an employee is required to be on duty or to be at a prescribed workplace; and (b) all time during which an employee is suffered or permitted to work.
Labor Code, Article 84 — What Counts As Hours Worked. Read the full provision →
The rule, stated without qualification
The sentence is one line long and carries no exceptions: Rest periods of short duration during working hours shall be counted as hours worked. Two conditions have to hold — the period is short, and it falls during working hours. Nothing else is asked. It does not matter whether the employer calls it a coffee break, a comfort break or a smoke break, whether the employee left the floor, or whether the break appears on a timesheet. If it is a brief pause inside the shift, the Code has already classified it.
Why the definition of hours worked matters here
The break rule sits at the end of a definition: Hours worked shall include (a) all time during which an employee is required to be on duty or to be at a prescribed workplace; and (b) all time during which an employee is suffered or permitted to work. Note that limb (a) does not require you to be working. Being required to be on duty, or to be somewhere, is enough. That is the logic the break rule follows — a short pause does not release you from duty or let you leave, so the time remains inside the definition.
Where the line is drawn, and where it is not
The Code does not define short, and that is where most disagreements live. What it does do is treat the meal period separately: Article 85 obliges an employer to give not less than sixty minutes off for regular meals, and describes it as time-off rather than as hours worked. So the structure is a contrast between a brief pause inside the shift, which counts, and a proper meal period, which is dealt with under its own provision. An employer cannot escape the break rule simply by relabelling a fifteen-minute pause as a meal.
The limb that catches unrecorded work
Limb (b) is worth remembering separately, because it is the one that answers the employer who says work was never authorised. Time an employee is suffered or permitted to work counts — tolerated work is still hours worked. If you routinely start before the log-in or stay after the log-out with the employer's knowledge, that time is within the definition even if nobody approved it. Keep your own contemporaneous record of actual start and finish times; it is the document these arguments usually turn on.