Management loves finding “efficiency improvements,” but they rarely understand how things actually work on the floor.

After a factory cut out the paid handover time between shifts, one employee decided to do only what he was paid for.

The result was a shutdown so effective it forced leadership to reverse the change almost immediately.

Read on for the full story!

Start 30 minutes later to save company money? Ok.

At one of the factories I worked at, we had a shift overlap.

Each shift was there for 8.5 hours, with a half-hour unpaid lunch.

We had a half-hour during shift change to tell the incoming shift what was going on with the machines.

Soon, someone decided there was a “better” way to do things.

A bean counter figured out how much money could be saved with this “unnecessary” half-hour handover time being cut.

This also cut our workday to 7.5 paid hours.

They told the lead men to coordinate the shift handover, even though there was too much information for one person to handle.

Cue the malicious compliance.

The workers figured out a pretty effective way to fight back.

I strolled onto the production floor at my new assigned start time.

Machines were all down.

Operators waited for me (a setup operator) and the lead man to discuss what needed to be done.

Instead of machines running continuously, they were shut down for at least a half-hour.

Management quickly felt the heat.

My lead man furiously asked me why I didn’t come in earlier.

I told him I don’t work for free.

Naturally, my approach to the new way spread to the other shifts, and suddenly people who always came in early decided they didn’t want to work for free either.

Then the higher-ups started to notice too.

The factory production levels dropped. Upper management asked why.

Several fingers were pointed at me for starting the rebellion, but nothing could be done to make us work for free.

A week later, our hours were changed back.

The higher-ups ended up learning an expensive lesson about cutting corners.

What did Reddit have to say?

Many businesses will do just about anything to turn a profit.

If you aren’t careful, it’s easy to be taken advantage of as an employee.

A lot of things look okay on paper, but don’t work out well in reality.

Sometimes it’s a good thing when a new idea crashes and burns.

All it took was one man following the rules to the letter to bring the system down.

Turns out, the people actually doing the work knew best. Who knew?

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.