I think my company is doing something wrong. It is a national company, but my team is based out of Colorado. They hire people at an hourly rate, but later tell them that we are on "project pay" which means a job has a set number of hours and if we don't get the project done in that time, we have to work off the clock until it is finished. Our volunteer hours are almost as numerous as our paid hours. Is this fair?

First off, you might want to remove the name of your employer from your post for your own protection.

Second - what is the name of your state - it is requested you furnish your state when posting.

Thanks.

I live in Colorado, the company's corporate office is in North Carolina, and my team travels between Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and rarely the Dakotas.

This can get complicated. You are being paid Hourly, which makes it very likely that you are Non-Exempt. There is at least a theoretical possibility of an Exempt Hourly employee but that would be limited to a very specific subset of industry and job duties classifications. If you want to explore that, we need to know your employer's industry and what your job duties are. Otherwise, I am going to assume that you are a Non-Exempt employee. That means that under federal law your employer legally must keep track of all hours worked, pay at least minimum wage for all hours worked, and must be paid at least a 50% premium for OT on all hours worked past 40 in the work week. Nothing the employer can do can make federal obligations go away.

It might also be required to pay more then MW for all hours worked, but we are no longer talking about federal law. We are now talking about state law, and none of the states you are talking about are ones that I have any familiarity with. And different states can and do have different ways of looking at this type of issue. You also maybe have some type of contract law argument regarding "detrimental reliance" on what you were offered versus what you ended up receiving in the way of compensation, but that is way outside my area of expertise and something that you probably would need to talk to a local attorney about.