Sabotage at Work : Labor: Millions resort to pranks as a protest on the job. A researcher is collecting their stories.

Mike Morasky was a 14-year-old farm boy who knew more about chickens than politics when he got a job as a page in Montana’s House of Representatives.

His first job was to organize the bills for the day’s agenda. Not knowing where else to begin, Morasky sorted the legislators’ paper work according to color--a decision that led to chaos on the House floor.

Watching the confusion from the wings, the teen-ager found the scene so exhilarating that he scrambled the bills again the next day, and the next.

While some might call Morasky a troublemaker, San Francisco writer Martin Sprouse says he’s simply one of millions of American workers who resort to pranks and subterfuge in order to feel better about themselves at work.

“At first I’d felt so dumb and no one was willing to help me,” Morasky, now 25, said recently. “But after I started that (the chromatic sorting), it was like I was smarter than my bosses were.”

“Workplace sabotage is as common as work itself,” said Sprouse. “Everybody has a (workplace sabotage) story.”

Sprouse has collected 100 such stories for a forthcoming book, “Sabotage in the American Workplace,” which he says will be the first worker-sympathetic look at the venerable practice.

“Theories of sabotage in the workplace have been well documented,” he said, “but I wanted people’s stories to speak on their own.”

Sprouse, a 23-year-old editor at the underground punk culture journal, Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, began by interviewing friends and their families. He reached a larger pool of workers by distributing fliers and, later, approached workers in places such as San Francisco’s financial district.

The saboteurs Sprouse has interviewed range in age from 14 to 64 with occupations as diverse as bicycle messenger, combine driver, Wall Street financial analyst, pineapple factory worker, computer systems developer and cemetery caretaker.

A soldier told him that while in Vietnam he disassembled rifles and reassembled their parts as stoves and heaters. A government clerk described routinely inflating invoices by adding any number of zeros to the original prices.

By the time the book is released at the end of the year, he also hopes to have interviewed a chemist, skycap, used car salesman, telephone operator, undocumented farm worker and others--for a total of 250 occupations.

All of the anecdotes will be anonymous.

“The names aren’t important,” he said. “The stories are.”

Sprouse’ definition of workplace sabotage--”the conscious or willful act of interfering with the structure and process of a workplace environment”--encompasses minor disobediences such as taking home a few paper clips or dawdling at the fax machine. (Businesses often cite such time-wasting tactics, or “theft of time,” as their biggest employee sabotage problem.)

Also included are more serious offenses such as computer sabotage and the destruction of materials or machinery.

Workers act up in protest of inadequate pay, abusive treatment by managers, or meaningless or monotonous work, Sprouse has found.

But the need for a laugh or a break in workday boredom also may motivate a would-be saboteur. The common denominator, he said, is that workplace saboteurs feel they have no power to improve their working conditions--their only outlet is to misbehave.

In management seminars and articles on the subject, saboteurs are usually painted as immature and irresponsible.

“I just don’t think (sabotage) is productive behavior,” said June Baldino Siegler, a senior program director with the American Management Assn. “I don’t think it’s a tool for getting what you want. It does nothing to improve your lot.”

But Sprouse argues that as long as most workers have little input in company policies, a cleverly designed act of sabotage may indeed help improve their lot--at least temporarily.

“It (sabotage) is a way of getting control over something that has control over you,” said Sprouse, who has worked since age 13. “Sabotage is the first step toward regaining your humanity in the workplace.”

Many of Sprouse’s subjects say they feel empowered by their acts of sabotage.

“I never felt I had any say in things before,” said a former bank teller. “But I knew from that point on (after committing sabotage) there is always something a worker can do. There’s always some out.”

The teller had become frustrated with what he felt were racist hiring policies at the bank. Talking about the problem with management was unproductive. So he put the word out on the streets that the bank was adopting a new check-cashing policy. The teller then spent a day cashing bad checks from the steady stream of what he called “marginal characters” who appeared at his window. (He quit the next day.)

By providing a showcase for such behavior, Sprouse might seem to be a marginal type himself, wildly out of sync with society’s law-abiding mainstream.

But Sprouse said he doesn’t feel like an oddball.

“I know everyone does it (sabotage). Any time you’re talking, daydreaming or going slow on the job because you had a rough night, you’re committing sabotage.”

And, of course, adds Sprouse, there is impressive historical precedent.

“Sabotage as a form of revolt is as old as human exploitation,” French author Emile Pouget wrote in 1911.

Machine wrecking, a form of workplace sabotage, was popular in the early 1800s among English textile workers who came to be known as Luddites.

And, in this country, sabotage was common among slaves who pretended not to know how to use hoes and wheelbarrows in order to avoid forced labor, Sprouse said.

The radical labor union known as the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) endorsed sabotage--defined as “working with purposeful inefficiency”--as an alternative to striking in cases where workers couldn’t afford to go without a paycheck.

Early in this century, bosses came to associate the black cat symbol of the Wobblies with impending sabotage. The slogan that accompanied the cat’s appearance was “Good Pay or Bum Work.”

“Sabotage was originally done for economic reasons, but along the line it got very personal,” said Richard Ellington, an Oakland resident who has been an IWW member for 35 years.

These days, he said, he sees more and more people who are so frustrated by their work that they commit sabotage not for any political reason but because they “instinctively feel this is at least one little victory for themselves.”

This new brand of personally motivated sabotage may be on the rise, according to Michael D. Crino, a professor of management at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Crino and a colleague interviewed personnel from more than a dozen companies on the subject.

“No one would talk on the record regarding statistics,” he said. “But most people we talked to intuitively felt sabotage was on the upswing. Everybody had a sabotage story to tell.”

Crino said some companies are taking steps to ease worker alienation by making the workplace more humane and responsive to worker complaints. But, in his view, there are far too few such attempts.

“Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing with some of what he (Sprouse) is saying,” said Crino. “But it’s very depressing to me to think the only way we can feel human in the workplace is to surreptitiously destroy things,” he said. “It’s sad if things have gotten that bad.”