Workers can subvert intake restrictions by exploiting legal application venues

Evidence

The power of street-level bureaucrats to thwart reforms by manipulating legal loopholes issuggested in a strategy paper prepared by New York City officials to reduce welfare rolls. It indicates managerial awareness of the limits of agency reform without worker cooperation. The paper rejects the possibility of shortening intake hours too drastically, in part because of the chance that “welfare workers would go out of the centers and take applications from people at home, on the street, etc., since application may be made [under existing Federal law] at agency office, in own home, by telephone, by mail, or in any suitable place.” — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s core thesis: frontline discretion overrides managerial reform faster than rule changes take hold — the institutionalization of worker practice outpaces the formal policy change. — connects to: Legalizing the right to strike channels workers away from earlier tactics — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1198; Regulatory exemptions function as exploitable loopholes undermining enforcement — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1536; Frontline workers can preserve discretion through legal loopholes that bureaucrats cannot close

Broader Connections

• Frontline workers can preserve discretion through legal loopholes that bureaucrats cannot close #corroborates (0.90)
• Regulatory exemptions function as exploitable loopholes undermining enforcement #expands (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1536