An Italian Strike (aka Work-to-Rule) is a version of this aimed at minimizing civil or criminal liability to strikers - pick the most inconvenient and debilitating safety regs that no one follows, and follow every single one of them. This is particularly common in countries or workplaces where law or contract prevents direct strikes.
Unions would have trouble advocating this as a form of strike in a direct dispute, because a union can only exert negotiating leverage if it publicly declares its intentions. However, I've heard anecdotal reports of this kind of sabotage being common in secondary/solidarity strikes - shipments showing up late or damaged or incorrect, external maintenance being done improperly, etc.
Quite common back in engineering the day in the UK, just before a big delivery it was common to go slow and work to rule - until suddenly some brown envelopes magickly appeared.
As the guy said even the tea boy got £900 and in the 70's that was a lot on money
This was exactly my same thought.
One could argue that a lot of the so-called "research" that is conducted at government subsidized laboratories in the United States like MIT Lincoln Laboratory provides a more modern example of this same form of "passive aggressive" workplace resistance.
For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.
He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.
Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:
Yup! Same thing, different name. "Italian Strike" is what they call it in European and Middle Eastern labor organizing traditions.
EDIT: With a bit of research: the term seems to have originated with the Biennio Rosso in Italy in 1919-20, when work-to-rule strikes were practiced on a large scale.
Unions would have trouble advocating this as a form of strike in a direct dispute, because a union can only exert negotiating leverage if it publicly declares its intentions. However, I've heard anecdotal reports of this kind of sabotage being common in secondary/solidarity strikes - shipments showing up late or damaged or incorrect, external maintenance being done improperly, etc.
EDIT: With a bit of poking around, I found that the Wobblies were big into this (and it's even where they got their name!): https://www.iww.org/history/icons/sabotage