I am a supervisor at a modern soap factory built about ten years ago at Ghaziabad, which is a fast-developing town in Uttar Pradesh and lies about 18 miles away from Delhi, the capital city. The factory is situated in beautiful and what one might call rural surroundings. The factory is itself surrounded by cultivable land and many of the factory workers own ancestral property here. The pattern of living of the workers in most cases, conforms to the joint family system. I feel that production at our factory has never come up to management’s expectations for several reasons. One of the these is heavy absenteeism, for during the agricultural season the factory workers stay at home to cultivate their own land. Since the worker is also a farmer, there is no death of food, and his factory job only provides him with liquid cash. Because he does not depend upon factory wages alone, the factory worker takes things easy, which results in a situation of chronic absenteeism in the factory. About six years ago, within the same factory compound, a fruit processing unit was also added by the company. The jobs in this unit are seasonal; that is, only during the fruit-growing season does it work to full capacity. The unit employs 22 workers. All of them are given semi-skilled grade E jobs. During the season, besides the bottling of fruit products, fruit juices are also filled in wooden casks and stored up, so that in lean periods, they could be bottled. Some of the jobs done in the unit are peeling fruit, extracting juice, boiling juice and other ingredients into syrups or jams, bottling capping, labeling, storing, and keeping the premises clean. During the lean period the major portion of all these jobs comes to an end and, therefore, part of the work force is transferred to the soap plant and allied sections, to make good labor shortages which occur there. However, a small portion of workers who remain in the fruit processing plant are given light jobs, such as keeping the premises clean, rolling the barrels, and so on. The only exceptions are the two workers who are engaged in filling and capping bottles. They have an obvious job title: Bottle Fettler and Capper. All workers in the fruit processing unit are permanent employees. When these two workers Bottle Filler and Capper – see others having an easy time they become disgruntled and demand higher wages, or that others do the filling and capping jobs as well. They cannot be given higher grades because in the soap factory people doing almost similar jobs are in Degrade and they too, would then claim higher grades. The other workers cannot be made to do these jobs because production suffer. The bottle filler and capper have done the job for years and have attained great speed in doing it. Others cannot match that speed. I first cajoled those two workers and also counseled them, but without success. Finally, I threatened them with punitive action. This has only resulted in a ‘go slow’ response from them. I am faced with a dilemma. I am convinced that so far as unit is concerned these two workmen’s demands are just and fair since the work-load on them is definitely more than on the others in the unit, and also their jobs are more skilled than that of the rest of the workers there. However, in the context of the entire factory, their demands cannot be conceded. 1. Discuss thoroughly what you think is the central problem in this case? 2. What concrete action do you recommend to solve this problem?
Answers
Answer:
Newton's law of cooling states that the rate of heat loss of a body is directly proportional to the difference in the temperatures between the body and its surroundings. The law is frequently qualified to include the condition that the temperature difference is small and the nature of heat transfer mechanism remains the same. As such, it is equivalent to a statement that the heat transfer coefficient, which mediates between heat losses and temperature differences, is a constant. This condition is generally met in heat conduction (where it is guaranteed by Fourier's law) as the thermal conductivity of most materials is only weakly dependent on temperature. In convective heat transfer, Newton's Law is followed for forced air or pumped fluid cooling, where the properties of the fluid do not vary strongly with temperature, but it is only approximately true for buoyancy-driven convection, where the velocity of the flow increases with temperature difference. Finally, in the case of heat transfer by thermal radiation, Newton's law of cooling holds only for very small temperature differences.