Worker noncompliance is a permanent lever against management because replacement costs are nontrivial
Evidence
Street-level bureaucrats, however, may devise ways to sabotage management efforts to reduce interactions with clients. The costs of achieving compliance in the face of workers’ resistance may sometimes be more than managers want to pay. … Whether street-level bureaucrats oppose efforts to limit their interaction with clients, or whether they accept and encourage such efforts as a way of salvaging an unattractive or deteriorating work situation, is perhaps the critical question on which the quality of public service ultimately depends. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 729 (
#builds-on, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Workers resist management rationing only when it threatens their own preferred practice — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 729