Strikers want better job conditions. Usually with regard to pay or hours or rights.
Nowadays, many jobs are plagued by too much administration. Workers can’t do their real work because they have to spend increasing amounts if time dealing with ever changing procedures that have to be followed or else… they have to tick off lists, work to narrow time frames, report endlessly in paper and to management. Especially in geriatric care, Dutch workers have almost reached the boiling point in their aversion to red tape. They feel the micromanagement has long passed the point where it would improve care and now only detracts from it.
I wonder, has there been any kind of strike by people demanding less micromanagement and less red tape in their work? How did that turn out?
I believe it called work to rule.
It’s when the workers do everything exactly, precisely according to every rule & regulation – regardless of how slow & inefficient that might be.
And it’s not a strike – the employees are still at their jobs, working hard, following all the company rules. It’s a ‘work slowdown’ or ‘work stoppage’, but not a strike. So the workers will still be paid, but the company doesn’t get much productive work done.
None of the red tape is even done right, IME. I had an IT job at a hospital where I spent a lot of time searching for computers. I was working on a project to upgrade them. They even gave me a list of where they were. It was many months out of date. There were supposed to be forms to fill out, when a PC was moved or decommisioned. I asked several times to read the logs of these forms, and they told me that the locations listed would have included the moves if the form was filed. My team wasted a lot of time because of this.
Thanks, but what I’m looking for would be the opposite of that. Geriatric workers here don’t want to strike or work-to-rule, because they don’t want their patients to suffer. So the kind of strike I’m looking for would mean the elderly patients got their care, but all the paperwork wouldn’t get done.
I am not sure how it works in the Netherlands but most Red Tape in the U.S. isn’t dictated by individual companies. It comes from government regulatory bodies backed by actual laws so there isn’t any entity that a group of workers can strike against and expect positive results.
I work in the pharmaceutical industry which is beyond Red Tape central but my ability to navigate it successfully is one of the main reasons I have my job in the first place. I am a consultant and I don’t even work for my client directly just like about half of the other people there and almost all of the people in my field. We couldn’t strike against our real employers without being replaced.
Even if we worked directly for the mega-corp client, it still wouldn’t do any good to strike against them. The Red Tape mainly comes from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and there is no striking against them because it is a very large and powerful federal agency with countless regulations and laws behind it. We just have to follow them and they send people in regularly to make sure that we are doing it almost perfectly all the time and even minor deviations get flagged for immediate remediation.
The same thing is true for banking, aviation, public education and countless other occupations. American employers generally hate Red Tape just as much as the workers do because they want to be efficient as possible but there is little they can do about that in highly regulated industries.
People have often gone on strike to protest work rules. The problem in North America is labour law pretty much restricts collective bargaining to wages and hours, not the broad issues that are often called “management’s rights.” So you may find that the protest is over something you do not have a legal right to negotiate.
And here, striking can only happen legally after the contract has expired and negotiations have stalled. Striking while the the collective agreement is in force is illegal. It happens, but much less than it did even 35 years ago. Then it was often done in protest against a specific abuse or problem. But the strikers and their union reps can be fined or sent to jail. It can work as a way to generate publicity, public interest, and investigations.
Finally, refusing to do a part of your job may be grounds for being fired.
But depending on the issue, how smart you play it, how well you can work the media, and how solid you and your fellow workers are, it could be a useful tactic. But just refusing to do the work is the easy part.