Street-level workers sacrifice pay to protect their ranks and workload.

Evidence

Consider the New York City policemen who, in October 1976, agreed to work overtime without pay so that a crop of rookie patrolmen would not be eliminated. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1533

Categorization

• CANDY: A tidy, tweetable vignette: cops working unpaid overtime to keep rookies on the force.