Ya it's all exactly this. The rationale for all these things seemed somewhat sane, but in practice they ended up being irrational when applied in the extreme. It's totally CYA stuff that's typical in public/government settings.
RE the wall they also said that nails and tape were also damaging to the paint (and repainting the walls was another union's thing), so the wall-hanging guy would have to log the "damage" to the wall caused by the hung item, presumably for cost/accounting purposes when it came time to repaint the wall.
> It's totally CYA stuff that's typical in public/government settings.
That CYA stuff is actually typical for any company that ever gets hit with a personal injury or other expensive lawsuit. It's pervasive in government/bigco's because they had to deal with decades of every imaginable stuff happening.
If you want to get rid of it, you gotta limit personal injury liability (which would border on being inhumane) or develop a decent social safety net with proper insurances...
> It's pervasive in government/bigco's because they had to deal with decades of every imaginable stuff happening.
This is important: big orgs—government and private—not only have more chance of having an incident (because they deal with more events because of their scale), they are often bigger litigation targets when an event occurs, because they are giant bags of money.
RE the wall they also said that nails and tape were also damaging to the paint (and repainting the walls was another union's thing), so the wall-hanging guy would have to log the "damage" to the wall caused by the hung item, presumably for cost/accounting purposes when it came time to repaint the wall.