Work to rule
Doing "exactly what you should" can be kind of subversive
I spent part of my childhood (the early 1970s) in England, when “industrial actions” were common. One of the peculiar regular features of life at that time was the news that some union, in some dispute, had decided to “work to rule.” As a rule-following child, it wasn’t obvious why such an approach should be a threat.
Of course, after I became an adult and started to work in organizations, I understood why it was effective, and why, in general, working to rule can be a useful tool for the otherwise powerless to assert themselves. The key observation is that human work processes typically include many aspects that are informal, not fully specified. That’s part of what makes humans more attractive than machines in many settings. People can handle incomplete specifications, learn on the fly, and adapt to changing circumstances. This is worth underscoring, because so much effort is devoted to reducing labor costs and implicit claims that people can be eliminated from many kinds of work.
Owners and managers often focus on the economic advantages of automation by implicitly assuming a zero-cost transition to automation, followed by a stable operating environment for the automation. In the real world, of course, there are costs for the initial transition from people to fully specified and inflexible machines, as well as additional subsequent costs of adapting when circumstances change. Those who are fond of robots and artificial intelligence have certainly made great strides in this area, compared to where we were a few decades ago. Nevertheless, it's still true that if you want a task done — especially if it might be a relatively short time before the nature of the task changes — it's often far cheaper to use a person than to get a machine.
So what happens when someone decides to work to rule? In a union shop, it means strict adherence to whatever rules have been negotiated in the union contract. Almost invariably, those rules impose unnecessary overheads to make operations slower and/or more expensive than they really need to be. There doesn't need to be any malice involved to create those overheads; neither management nor union has any interest in trying to go to the level of detail that would be required to fully specify acceptable behavior under all possible circumstances. As specified, the rules are almost certainly wrong, but are workable when handled thoughtfully. If both sides are willing and friendly, the rules can be relaxed — typically leading to benefits for both sides. If the two sides are not agreeable, the rules can be followed exactly — typically leading to various minor dysfunctions.
If the workplace is not a union shop, obviously there's no union contract, and so it's less clear what it would mean to work to rule. But even in the absence of a union, there are policies and procedures, there are business processes, there are compliance and reporting requirements of various kinds. Once again, a strict adherence to all possibly relevant rules and processes imposes costs that are not ordinarily in place.
What's intriguing about work to rule, whether in a union or a non-union setting, is that it is a way of creating a problem while being able to deny that there’s a problem. There are rules, they are being followed, what could be wrong with that? Management efforts to argue in terms of “reasonableness” or “realism” can be countered with the observations that
not everyone necessarily agrees with that notion of reasonableness or realism; indeed, that is perhaps a part of the dispute, and furthermore
it is not a good look for management to be asking workers to subvert the rules. If management attempts to “stop” work to rule, in the best case it looks like management is asking for corner cutting; in the worst case, it looks like management is encouraging illegal behavior.
Clearly, organizations are more effective when worker discontents don’t rise to the level of prompting industrial actions at all. (That’s the kind of organization I want to be in.) Next best is when workers have some legal, mutually-respected framework in which they can be organized to address discontents via strikes or similar ways of asserting collective power. But it’s interesting to realize that even if “ordinary” organized actions like strikes are illegal, impractical, or dangerous for workers, there are other ways to withhold one’s best efforts.