Unions would have trouble advocating this as a form of strike in a direct dispute, because a union can only exert negotiating leverage if it publicly declares its intentions. However, I've heard anecdotal reports of this kind of sabotage being common in secondary/solidarity strikes - shipments showing up late or damaged or incorrect, external maintenance being done improperly, etc.

EDIT: With a bit of poking around, I found that the Wobblies were big into this (and it's even where they got their name!): https://www.iww.org/history/icons/sabotage

As the guy said even the tea boy got £900 and in the 70's that was a lot on money

For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.

He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.

Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...

Yup! Same thing, different name. "Italian Strike" is what they call it in European and Middle Eastern labor organizing traditions.

EDIT: With a bit of research: the term seems to have originated with the Biennio Rosso in Italy in 1919-20, when work-to-rule strikes were practiced on a large scale.

I'm mostly familiar with it from Israeli discourse.

Hitting "LGTM" without actually reviewing the change.

One example, thanks to a recent article by Rachel By the Bay: badly crafted queries can bring an organization to a halt.

"Middle Management"

They'd look like examples from past discussions of how a bad programmer can provide negative value to the company.