I am not sure what a pause is, so maybe I don’t understand the standards in your industry, so, grain of salt here.
If you hired a contractor to work on your house, and one guy just stood around waiting to do his part, and declined to help his peers to make the process more efficient, but you had to pay his regular rate, I bet you would be annoyed.
The ‘other duties as assigned’ expectation has been consistent during my entire career, at every job I have ever had. I have never held a job where, if I was not busy, and someone else was, and I possessed the ability to help, where I was not supposed to pitch in. That is just what you do to support the peers you work with, which should be the goal. Your organization is there to provide a thing (no matter what the org is) and everyone hired is meant to support achieving the goal.
I can empathize with the desire to malicious compliance, but… I would make sure ‘other duties as assigned’ are genuinely not a part of the expectations, because if they are, this is a pretty lickity split route to not having this job anymore. No manager wants to have to either chase someone down and argue about being generally helpful, or place additional work on your peers because you want to do less.
You are right. I mean a crew. You are also right, sometimes every job needs the people responsible for the work to stop and think.
This is not what the op was describing. They were describing a desire to actively avoid work that contributed to the whole, not because they had to have that time they would lose to do their job right, but because it was “extra” work. The point was “extra” isn’t always “extra”; you are being paid to be at work for x hours, you should be working. Sometimes working = thinking, but that wasn’t the story.
If I hired a crew, and Joe was sitting around with his thumb up his butt, and ducked out of the extra work his leads gave him, I suspect I would never have to say anything, because Joe probably wouldn’t have his job long enough for me to talk to the foreman.
The point was to encourage op to look at what they were doing from a different perspective that puts them in the position of having to see resources being wasted, and how it is impactful to the end result. It is good to consider things from multiple angles, so your choices are informed.