You have a fair point about both tepid levels of rational risk assessment; and the power of desperation to sweep aside caution.
I think my intended point was not so much that people wouldn’t take risks to improve their situation, especially if under economic stress(I fully expect that they will); just that sabotage based work-making seems overwhelmingly risky compared to alternatives based around doing work that is necessary, but slowly; or exaggerating the amount of work that needs to be done by insistence on the most time consuming procedures, thorough tests, etc. If one must resort to sabotage, I’d think that, even then, it would be vastly safer if you use it to justify a non-sabotage maintenance activity rather than sabotage first, then fix(eg. swap out a part that’s absolutely fine; then damage it to provide a justification for why you swapped it out and you’ve not sabotaged an aircraft: damage an aircraft so that a part will need to be swapped out and you’ve made the same amount of work at the cost of notably more federal charges).
It appears that, in this case, someone did actually glue foam into an airplane shortly before takeoff, so clearly ignorance, desperation, just not being the sharpest bulb in the rocket ship, or something can inspire doing so; I just find it surprising; because it seems like the most dangerous option for creating some extra work.
