Work-to-rule doesn’t really accomplish that.
1. Personal Growth is limited, or further upward movement is undesirable.
2. They intend to be with the organization a finite remaining time, or would welcome an early exit
A proper strike can be differentiated from a lazy workforce, self-sabotaging work cannot be.
Typically, work to rule is used to highlight specific bad rules, regulations, or enforcement practices at a company.
Say a company expects employees to do non-rule “glue” work to keep the company functioning. But, randomly and capriciously the company punishes workers for doing this “non-rule” work. A union can then announce that they will only be sticking to the letter of the rules until either the rules are changed, or the arbitrary and capricious enforcement of the rule is changed.
So I switched my focus to completing tickets. A few weeks later I overheard my manager complaining about a breaking change made by another team that I had previously been coordinating with: "Why is this happening so much? We didn't used to get surprised by these sorts of problems."
Work-to-rule is most effective when you’re trying to highlight particularly bad individual rules, or arbitrary punishments, etc. The work to rule action serves to clearly highlight to management why the current status quo rules are broken. This is, naturally, the most effective when there are very specific problems that lead to pretty direct consequences.
Work-to-rule would be much less effective when used for the kinds of things a strike might be used (increased pay, improved benefits, etc).
Basically, they’re just different tactics that highlight different things, and are each best used to achieve different kinds of goals.
- Homer Simpson
