was it not spelled out the amount of work you are required to do in how many hours, in exchange for what compensation? do you have that in writing? Just do the work you agreed to do and let what happens, happen.

The hourly rate is fixed.

But they are giving people more work than they can possibly do in a 40 hr week.

this company? If not, they may not know. What to do depends on what you want. If you really want the job keep your head down and work hard. If not, notify the agency that placed you about what is going on.

Period.
Eko

on edit,
work your full hours then contact them and tell them you will need to be auth for more hours to finish.

Clearly a labor violation, either on part of contractor or contractor.

But asking someone to work without being paid is clearly illegal.

I guess it would only come up if I were terminated, in which case they would never admit assigning too much work or refusing to pay overtime. All the folks in power are very careful about what they say, so you have to glean it from your peers and read between the lines.

always replied: I’m happy to do x y z. What do you want me to take off the a b c list?

"you should all be working AT LEAST 40 hours per week."

Without saying it, he implied that we should all be volunteering to work extra hours without expecting to be paid for it. That's everyone. I did not work extra hours yesterday, so I was behind on the assigned work. Some of my co-workers did work all evening, and some of us did not. I had to give away some of my work to the people who finished first, so it would get done.

One of the managers was getting on us for not finishing this on time, and I told her we were only assigned the work yesterday. She answered "IS THAT WHAT I ASKED YOU?"

I don't see how I can make this work. I am not willing to volunteer or take responsibility for the mistakes of my managers. And that's apparently what you have to do to get by here.

Seriously, I don't work for free. Period.

I remember a commercial from a bank that was advertising their home improvement loans on the radio. The voice of the contractor in the commercial (I think it might have been about a deck) said something eloquent, "I can build it fast, I can build it good, I can build it cheap. You get to pick which two of those you get."

Maybe I'm too cynical but a line from a 1975 movie that sticks with me: "Well, the fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay." He was an assassin.

Not a line of work I recommend. In terms of work available be careful that your current struggle to meet unrealistic productivity expectations doesn't blind you to better positions that you might find.

I mostly deal only with shops that I know well. I sometimes look at contract engineer weekly (ceweekly/cjhunter). Good luck.

At a meeting a couple of weeks ago the manager said that some people are not going to be working here for long if they aren't doing what he asks.

Then I found out one person had given notice. I don't know much about him, but he seemed to contribute a lot.

Two more people disappeared with no notice after that - and they were both people who worked a lot of overtime hours and were very hard workers. Since they just vanished, I am assuming they got fired, but maybe they got fed up and quit.

This week there was another person gone.

So I am looking for something new, but I don't want to get into another crazy situation. And being remote, nobody talks about it. You wouldn't ask in email or messaging, because its all visible to the manager, and we're just supposed to act like we did not notice.

I'm in bizarro world.

Just found out another person disappeared.

Who would have guessed!

Look, the fact that for almost ten years we had to live with the concept of 'unpaid internship' as a real and perfectly accepted thing tells you everything you need to know about employment in the corporate world. If you want to retain your health, your sanity, and any chance at living past the age of 40, stay away from it!