Anti-fascist Friday - How to sabotage your workplace, part four

We've covered how employees can hinder authoritarian workplaces at an organizational level, how managers can be welcomed into the resistance and how office workers can get into the mix.

This week, we open the Simple Sabotage Field Manual again and see how you, as an employee in general, can take part in taking down fascism.

• Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one, try to make a small wrench do when a big one is necessary, use little force when considerable force is needed, and so on.
• Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lathe or punch, take needless time to do it. If you are cutting, shaping or doing other measure work, measure dimensions twice as often as you need to. When you go to the lavatory, spend a longer time there than is necessary.
• Forget tools so that you will have to go back after them.
• Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
• Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.
• Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
• Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skilled worker.
• Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
• If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
• Misroute materials.
• Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.

Next we will take a look at my favorite subject, how to lower morale in the workplace. This is the third part in a series about how you, as a civilian, can slow down fascism in the workplace.