I work as a holiday cleaner, in our industry we face a severe labor shortage. My company attemps to solve this with hiring flexworkers/sham contractors. I am already under a lot of pressure and some of our employees get away with doing as little as possible while the work is dumped on others. Today I was expected to take a sham contractor under my wing. They are paid somewhat more than I get as obviously they need to pay taxes. So while they are sham contractors, who can show up when they want, they aren't truly exploited. If they got the same low pay as me, while also having to pay for taxes, I would have called out the company and tell them to go another contractor.
While I somehow had to teach them everything, they weren't supposed to do a lot of work. So on top of doing my own duties, I had to teach them and check any small thing they were capable of, while the work pressure is already high due to shortages. For me, I felt this was nothing but a distraction with no real benefits so while teaching the sham contractor I also made them actually do the tasks to distribute duties more equally. My manager said “but our contractors aren't suppossed to do X and Y task, they will do the light/easy stuff. The reason is they are temp workers.” This is a bs reason since even real employees can leave anytime and many of them already do as little as a contractor, because the company can't afford to fire them.
When my manager found out I shared the work with one of the contractors, they gave me a huge preach, but I just walked out. They told me: “You are refusing work, so bye,” Not much later the manager begged me to come back again but I didn't. So now I am waiting for mediation with another higher up. I am not sure my attitude is fully justified but the labor shortage may be explained by their shitty treatment and ridiculous distribution of the duties.