Work-to-rule and holidays, and police officers refusing to issue citations. Refusal to work overtime, travel on duty, or sign up to other tasks requiring employee assent are other manifestations of using work-to-rule as industrial action. It was described by Sir John Donaldson as a decision to "Give the rules a meaning which no reasonable man could give them and work to that." Sometimes the term "rule-book slowdown" is used in a slightly different sense than "work-to-rule": the former involves applying to-the-letter rules that are normally set aside or interpreted less literally to increase efficiency; the latter, refraining from activities which are
Work (thermodynamics) system is well defined and equal to the pressure exerted by the system on the surroundings. This arrangement for transfer of energy as work can be varied in a particular way that depends on the strictly mechanical nature of pressure–volume work. The variation consists in letting the coupling between the system and surroundings be through a rigid rod that links pistons of different areas for the system and surroundings. Then for a given amount of work transferred, the exchange of volumes involves different pressures, inversely with the piston areas, for mechanical equilibrium. This cannot be done for the transfer of