| HN Mirror

From Wikipedia:

> Work-to-rule is a job action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract or job, and strictly follow time-consuming rules normally not enforced.

From Gene Sharp's "The Methods of Nonviolent Action":

> 110. Slowdown Strike

> In the slowdown strike (also known as the go-slow and in Britain and elsewhere by the Welsh word ca'canny78 instead of leaving their jobs or stopping work entirely, the workers deliberately slow down the pace of their work until the efficiency is drastically reduced.79 In an industrial plant this slowdown has its effects on profits; in governmental offices it would, if continued, reduce the regime's capacity to rule.

> Slowdowns in work by African slaves in the United States are reported in statements by ex-slaves and others. Raymond and Alice Bauer summarize these:

> The amount of slowing up of labor by the slaves must, in the aggregate, have caused a tremendous financial loss to plantation owners. The only way we have of estimating it quantitatively is through comparison of the work done on different plantations and under different systems of labor. The statement is frequently made that production on a plantation varied more than 100 percent from time to time. Comparison in the output of slaves in different parts of the South also showed variations of over 100 percent.80 Russian serfs in 1859 showed their opposition to their serfdom by doing less work,81 and two years later in the early weeks of 1861, following an explicit promise of emancipation, the peasants conducted go-slows on the corvees.

> The peasants carried out these duties, from which they thought they would soon be exempted, more and more slowly and more and more reluctantly. A sort of spontaneous strike, aimed at loosening the bonds of serfdom, and making submission to the local administrative authorities less specific, accompanied, and often partly replaced an open but sporadic refusal to yield to the landlord's will. 82

> Franz Neumann describes the ca'canny or the slowdown as "one of the decisive methods of syndicalist warfare" and claims that its first large-scale use—he presumably means in industrial conflicts—was by Italian railway workers in 1895.83 It had, however, previously been used by Glasgow dockers after an unsuccessful strike in 1889.84

> During the Nazi occupation, "Dutch factory workers went slow, particularly when they were forced to work in Germany . . ,"85 In 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps broadcast an appeal to workers in Nazi-occupied Europe to "go slow" in their work. Goebbels thought silence the best means of fighting the appeal, since he wrote, "the slogan of 'go slow' is always much more effective than that of 'work fast.'"86 German workers themselves appear to have used slowdown strikes very effectively in 1938 and 1939. Go-slows by the coal miners during that period led to a significant drop in production, which in turn prodded the government to launch efforts to raise production and to grant significant wage increases.87 The wage freeze of September 1939, other worsening labor conditions, and the "clear . . . intention of the regime at the outbreak of the war ... to abolish all social gains made in decades of social struggle" led to similar more widespread action by German workers. Neumann writes:

> > ... it is at this point that passive resistance 88 seems to have begun on a large scale. The regime had to give way and to capitulate on almost every front. On 16 November 1939, it reintroduced the additional payments for holiday, Sunday, night, and overtime work. On 17 November 1939, it reintroduced paid holidays and even compensation to the workers for previous losses. On 12 December 1939, the regime had finally to enact new labor-time legislation, and strengthen the protection of women, juveniles, and workers as a whole. 89

> In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, "there was of course also in general the go-slow campaign when workers would either absent themselves from work or reduce the tempo of their work." 90

> 111. Working-to-rule strike

> The working-to-rule strike is "the literal carrying out of orders in a way calculated to retard production and reduce the employer's profit margin." 91 The workers remain at their jobs but meticulously observe all the rules and regulations of the union, employer, and the contract concerning how the work should be done, safety regulations, and so on, with the result that only a fraction of the normal output is produced. It is thus a variation of the slow-down strike under the technical excuse of doing the job extremely well. Neumann (who lumps the work-to-rule together with the broader slowdown strike) states that this kind of strike was applied successfully by the Austrian railway workers in 1905, 1906 and 1907 in the form of "scrupulous compliance" with all traffic and security regulations 92 It was also used in a series of local railway disputes in Britain preceding the General Strike in 1926, and during the 1949 British railway wage dispute. 93