Yoshie responded:
It goes without saying that behind "spontaneous" actions are years of hard organizing, but the rest of your remarks on work-to-rule and sit-down strikes show your ambivalence about what a union movement consists of. Mostly, many people are trained to think that unions mean only unions legally recognized as such by employers with whom they sign contracts. The way you put it, tools of industrial struggles are either only available to workers who are already union members or workers who are seeking to have companies sign contracts with unions. What is a union, though? It's a group of workers who organize themselves to achieve the same goals, be they higher wages, more benefits, better working conditions, enforcement of safety rules, or reinstatement of fellow workers who are fired. All workers should learn and use tools of industrial struggles to achieve such goals, whether or not they are already in legally recognized bargaining units, whether or not they want to constitute themselves as such.
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I think "work to rule" can be used in a non-union workplace by people who have the self-conscious desire to implement it. It can also be a stepping stone towards the organization of a class conscious union:
Work to Rule
Almost every job is covered by a maze of rules, regulations, standing orders, and so on, many of them completely unworkable and generally ignored. Workers often violate orders, resort to their own techniques of doing things, and disregard lines of authority simply to meet the goals of the company. There is often a tacit understanding, even by the managers whose job it is to enforce the rules, that these shortcuts must be taken in order to meet production quotas on time.
But what would happen if each of these rules and regulations were followed to the letter? Confusion would result -- production and morale would plummet. And best of all, the workers can't get in trouble with the tactic because they are, after all, "just following the rules."
Under nationalization, French railroad strikes were forbidden. Nonetheless, railroad workers found other ways of expressing their grievances. One French law requires the engineer to assure the safety of any bridge over which the train must pass. If after a personal examination he is still doubtful, then he must consult other members of the train crew. Of course, every bridge was so inspected, every crew was so consulted, and none of the trains ran on time.
In order to gain certain demands without losing their jobs, the Austrian postal workers strictly observed the rule that all mail must be weighed to see if the proper postage was affixed. Formerly they had passed without weighing all those letters and parcels which were clearly underweight, thus living up to the spirit of the regulation but not to its exact wording. By taking each separate piece of mail to the scales, carefully weighing it, and then returning it to its proper place, the postal workers had the office congested with unweighed mail on the second day.
full: http://www.anarchosyndicalism.net/theory/guide2da.htm
Solidarity, Mike B)
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