Do Temp Services have different Labor laws? Fraud need lots of help! Indiana

[PlNKYICEYES]

My self I am just a temp worker. I have worked for the same place for three years. Not that I want to that i have too. Jobs are hard to come by. Over the last couple years the Temp service I work with gets away with a lot of unpaid man hours. I show up to the same place to work everyday for the past three years. Our hours have changed from the hours of the regular company employees. They come in 15 minutes before we do. Our supervisor for the temp service yells and screams at us if we are not there when they are. She tells us we are late and that she we take away our points if we are not there at the same time. Even though we still have 15 more minutes. For those of us that get there sooner get placed. But the full time employees want us to start working when they do. They want us to build up product. To me is this not consider working? Should we not be paid for that? If we are caught just standing around then we get yelled at again. What can we do get someone to come in and take care of this problem. I know this is not legal.

Plus if we are on mandatory overtime and we come in and are not placed. We do not get paid. When we have to come in on our days off because they tell us we have too. We could be there all night or just an hour. If we do not get placed with someone then we have to stand there and wait to be told if we can go home or not. If I am there for an hour should we not be paid for this? I called once and complained and they told me as long as my name was not on someones paper work I was not considered working at the time. But yet i came in on my day off to stand there for an hour. For them to figure out if they want all of us to stay or not. This is not right. This can't be legal. Can someone please help me?

[DAW]

Easy stuff first. Look at the "hours worked" question. Generally speaking if the employer (any employer) is controlling your time, it is hours worked. Read the following and assume that federal DOL knows what they are talking about. This is very black letter law.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs22.pdf

Federal law (FLSA) looks at hours worked and pretty much nothing else. It is perfectly legal to ask you to come in on your day off, tell you to stand around for an hour, and then to go home. Federal law cares about paying you for that one hour but could not care less about making you come in on your day day off or only paying you for the one hour.

Now if you are looking for some blanket statement that the "rules" for temp agency employees are identical in all aspects to those for non-temp agency employees, I am not going to make such a statement. You basically need to parse out each of your issues one at a time. Figure out if there is even any "law" for each particular issue. For example, your employer uses "points" apparently, which is not a legal concept. How the employer uses "points" may be legal, or may be not legal, but there is no "points" law.

[lolcat]

Any time your employer controls your time, that is considered time worked. If your employer is not paying for that time worked you can file a Dept of Labor complaint to get your back wages paid.

I do not know what this "points" system is as you did not give much information on it. An employer yelling and screaming is not, in itself, illegal.

Here is a link to the Indiana Dept of Labor FAQ page. http://www.in.gov/dol/2345.htm