Kellogg's Six-Hour Day [Paperback]

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1996

On December 1, 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, W.K. Kellogg replaced the traditional three daily eight-hour shifts in his cereal plant with four six-hour shifts. By adding on a new shift he and his managers created jobs for employees that the company had laid off and for other unemployed persons in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure - from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom. Kellogg's employees, like centuries of workers, believed that work was a means to an end. An overwhelming number of employees were willing to "share their work" and found the extra time an opportunity to invest in the family, community, church, and individual freedom.When World War II ended, Kellogg's managers abandoned the six-hour shift and began with the rest of the nation to define progress as more work for more people. Losing sight of the original dream of more time to live outside necessity, management argued that work should remain the center of life, providing identity, meaning, and purpose to an otherwise meaningless existence. Hunnicutt documents the struggle of those workers, mostly women, who resisted management and the new beliefs about work's centrality. They fought to keep their six-hour shifts until 1985, and in the process preserved the century-old vision of "progressive shortening of the hours of labor."Their story is a monument to workers' struggle for control over their lives and for substantial freedom beyond necessity. It serves as a reminder of a remarkable vision of progress, offering hope and guidance to the last decade of this century when layoffs, downsizing, mandatory overtime, and a "jobless future" plague the nation. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also the author of "Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work" (Temple).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1930, W. K. Kellogg, the famed breakfast cereal magnate from Battle Creek, Michigan, established a six-hour workday for his laborers. In the depths of the Depression, this policy provided more labor for more workers, and the experiment continued until the mid-1980s. Paradoxically, the six-hour workday was ended not because of poor productivity, but because workers wanted more hours so they could consume more. Hunnicutt's book mostly succeeds in balancing sound scholarship and interviews with the workers and managers that participated in this 55-year experiment in a reduced workday--the kind of workday envisioned by futurists since the mid-1800s, but repeatedly eschewed by wage earners. An interesting examination of how Americans place more value on income than leisure.

From Publishers Weekly

Do we live to work or work to live? The question of how important work is in our lives is central to Hunnicutt's study of Kellogg's daring social experiment, which began in 1930 and lasted until 1985. At the start of the depression, W.K. Kellogg replaced the traditional three eight-hour shifts at his cereal plant with four six-hour shifts. In the downsized world we live in, it is hard to conceive of a CEO who would add a shift in order to employ people laid off by other plants and raise the six-hour shift workers' wages more than 12% to make up for the loss of two work hours per day. The other half of his plan was to increase people's involvement in their community and their families' lives. Kellogg workers, especially the women, managed to find things to do with their extra time until WWII; after the war, workers, particularly men, seemed less able to find ways to fill their unstructured time. Using interviews with Kellogg employees dating back to the program's beginning, as well as various studies on work, Hunnicutt (Work Without End) paints a sad picture of a society where people prefer buying things to socializing, a world where a shorter work day is no longer desirable because few know what to do with their spare time. When the six-hour day came to an end in 1985, women were the only ones who protested. Most men had succumbed to the belief that working longer was more manly and that going home after six hours to be with the family was not really the thing to do. This examination of the American attitude toward work is not light reading, but it could serve as a wake-up call for a nation in big trouble if the jobless future comes to pass.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 261 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press; First edition. edition (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566394481
• ISBN-13: 978-1566394482
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #626,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.