I’ve done a lot of googling, but can’t find an answer for this specific situation.
I’m a contractor for a large corporation and I manage a small team who are also all contractors. We have an…overseer? liaison? I don’t know what to call him, but he works for the client company — who is obsessed with control and has zero respect for people’s time.
This week we have a big project we’ve been working on and he’s been making the team stay late every day, long after not only their 8 hours are up, but also after everything is done for the day. They’re afraid to ask to leave or tell him they’re leaving because we’ve already seen him remove people from the account for no actual reason. He knows they won’t leave until he releases them and he just…doesn’t. I’ll hear afterward that people stayed until 7:30pm after after a 12 hour workday where the last few hours were just sitting around because he hadn’t let them go yet.
I’ve addressed this with my manager and am working on dealing with this in other ways, but what I want to know is if this is even legal. We’re in California and everything I’ve read says that mandatory overtime is legal and doesn’t require any notice, but since the person demanding it works for the client company, not our company, can he legally do what he’s doing?
They’ve tried just telling him they’re going to leave and then he makes up some reason they need to stay. They’ve tried leaving when he’s not around, but then when he notices he’ll make comments to the others about the person who left.
I’m new to this position (he had my old manager removed because she pushed back on him too much) and I’m trying to protect my team but I’m just at a loss as to how. These people have lives and he just doesn’t seem to care.