{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"298. Kellogg's 6-Hour Day","description":"In the midst of the Great Depression, cereal manufacturer Kellogg\u2019s switched to a shorter, six-hour day. This continued a trend that seemed inevitable: people would work less and less. But economic policies, management strategies, and cultural attitudes changed. The story of the rise and fall of Kellogg\u2019s six-hour day is a microcosm of these changes, as well as of our attitudes about the roles of money, leisure, work, and women and men. In the book, Kellogg\u2019s 6-Hour Day, historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt shares his findings in studying Kellogg\u2019s shorter workday. His main sources of information were 434 interviews conducted by the Women\u2019s Bureau of the Department of Labor, 124 interviews he himself conducted of workers, and 241 responses to a survey he had sent. What follows is a summary of the story, and Hunnicutt\u2019s findings. Kellogg\u2019s switched to a 6-hour day to create jobs During the Great Depression, American businesses took on a policy of \u201cwork sharing.\u201d The idea was that fewer would be unemployed if everyone shared jobs \u2013 more workers, working fewer hours. So, on December 1, 1930, W. K. Kellogg changed most departments in Kellogg\u2019s Battle Creek, Michigan plant from three eight-hour shifts to four six-hour shifts. A shorter workday had seemed inevitable This continued a decades-long trend of shorter working hours. Labor activist William Heighton had written in 1827 that the workday should be reduced from twelve hours to ten, eight, and so on, \u201cuntil the development and progress of science have reduced human labour to its lowest terms.\u201d John Stuart Mill had written in 1848 about his vision for a \u201cStationary State\u201d: After necessities were met, people would seek progress in mental, moral, and social realms. John Maynard Keynes would predict in the same year Kellogg\u2019s switched to six hours, 1930, that we\u2019d have a fifteen-hour work week by 2030. George Bernard Shaw and Julian Juxley had predicted a maximum two-hour workday by the end of the 1900s. Other businesses shortened their workdays, too Other businesses followed Kellogg\u2019s\u2019 lead. A survey by the Industrial Conference Board in 1931 estimated 50% of American businesses had shortened hours to save jobs. President Herbert Hoover was considering making a 6-hour day a national policy. In the 1932 presidential campaign, both major parties were advocating shorter hours. The 6-hour day was the hot business topic Not only did the six-hour day help create jobs, it seemed for a while like it was a better business policy. Forbes called it \u201cthe topic of discussion in the business world.\u201d Business Week concluded it was profitable. The New York Times called it \u201ca complete success.\u201d Factory and Industrial Management magazine called the six-hour day, the \u201cbiggest piece of industrial news since Ford announced his five-dollar-a-day policy.\u201d At Kellogg\u2019s, 15% more shredded wheat cases were being packed per hour. Profits had doubled in 1931, versus three years prior. After five years with the six-hour day, overhead costs had been reduced 25%, labor costs 10%, with 41% fewer accidents. W. K. Kellogg said, \u201cWe can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.\u201d (That should be taken with a grain of salt. W. K. Kellogg took pride in crafting a public image as a \u201cwelfare capitalist,\u201d as evinced by the full-page newspaper ads he took out, boasting how Kellogg\u2019s had done its part. In reality, nearly half of workers later surveyed recalled that their wages were reduced.) Kellogg\u2019s returned to an 8-hour day for WWII In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to direct the maximum amount of manpower toward supporting the country\u2019s fight in WWII. Kellogg\u2019s responded in kind by temporarily returning to eight-hour shifts. A rift formed between Kellogg\u2019s management and the labor union This was actually an opportunity the company had been looking for. Kellogg\u2019s management and that at other companies were beginning to resent the six-hour day, and workers were becoming divided over whether they wanted a shorter workday, or more pay. In 1936, the National Council of Grain Producers had started a union chapter in Kellogg\u2019s Battle Creek headquarters. W. K. Kellogg had been proud to pay what he considered the best hourly wages in town. During the first meeting with union officers, he wept, and kept saying, \u201cIf only they had come to me, I would have given them what they wanted.\u201d The union got an inch, and wanted a mile After this point, the relationship between Kellogg\u2019s workers and management became adversarial. W. K. had left in 1937, after the union came in, and at that point the union leaders had been pushing to not only have a six-hour day, in which they could earn a bonus based upon productivity, but they had also wanted time-and-a-half pay for working more than six hours in a day. Hunnicutt wrote, \u201cMore than any other union demand, this position would come to haunt Kellogg workers.\u201d Demanding overtime pay on a six-hour day helped turn management against the shorter workday, and create a rift between workers who wanted higher wages, and workers who wanted shorter hours. In the larger relationship between management and labor, the American Federation of Labor introduced a bill in congress, prohibiting goods produced by workers working more than thirty hours a week from being traded across state lines. Hunnicutt cites this as having shifted the business world\u2019s stance on shorter hours from support to opposition. Shorter hours became exploitation, longer hours a reward In 1938, Kellogg\u2019s management deepened the divide between six-hour and eight-hour workers by proposing they be allowed to schedule 40-hour weeks during periods of heavy production. Overtime became available instead of a productivity bonus. Senior workers had priority access to overtime, and so they lost interest in the productivity bonus. So in the early 1940s, before the war, worker opinions were shifting to view shorter hours not as a benefit, but as instead an exploitation of workers \u2013 making them bear the brunt of fighting unemployment. And Kellogg\u2019s was actively campaigning against shorter days, asking workers to consider how much more they would make working eight hours. Human Relations Management saw work as life\u2019s center Meanwhile, the business world was shifting from a Scientific Management philosophy to a Human Relations Management philosophy. Scientific Management practitioners were obsessed with efficiency, but Human Relations Management practitioners were more interested in imbuing work with joy and meaning \u2013 making work its own reward. The Human Relations Management school envisioned that as work brought satisfaction, engineers and scientists would lead society into an orderly world, where desires met obligations, consumption met production, and work and leisure merged. According to Humans Relations Management, time away from work and consumption was a relic of an illogical past. Instead of work becoming obsolete, giving way to more freedom, work would become the center of life, and help us ascend Maslow\u2019s hierarchy. Fewer workers wanted to return to 6 hours After the war, many departments returned to six-hour shifts, but six-hour workers slowly lost their beloved shorter shifts over the following decades. Central to this struggle was how workers viewed leisure. Kellogg\u2019s workers had previously voted to essentially \u201cbuy\u201d shorter working hours, being paid less overall, in exchange for more leisure time. Employees used their time to improve their homes, go hunting, grow and can food in their gardens, and spend time volunteering in their communities. But slowly, workers became less interested in having time away from work. Leisure was outsourced to mass media One explanation from a worker Hunnicutt interviewed was, people were now outsourcing all things they used to spend time on. One place they were outsourcing to was mass media. Sports had been such serious business amongst Kellogg\u2019s employees, they had hired \u201csemi-pro\u201d softball or basketball players to play on the teams. But why watch the company team play, when you can watch pros on television? One former six-hour worker bemoaned that even conversation had been outsourced \u2013 to radio, or television talk-show hosts. Shorter hours became seen as weak and feminine The question, Six hours or eight? became a gender issue. Early on, both men and women were interested in six-hour shifts. Three-fourths of men voted for six-hour shifts in 1937, but half of men were working eight hours by 1947. The six-hour departments began to be referred to as \u201cgirls\u2019 departments,\u201d doing \u201cwomen\u2019s work.\u201d Management also assigned sick and disabled employees to the six-hour departments. Men who chose to work six-hours were labeled \u201csissies,\u201d \u201clazy,\u201d or \u201cweird.\u201d Men saw work, not leisure, as a source of control and identity Hunnicutt\u2019s interpretation was that men were increasingly seeing work as a place for control and identity \u2013 that many hadn\u2019t known what to do with themselves after their shorter shifts. They didn\u2019t like spending more time at home and being assigned chores by their wives, or hearing what they considered gossip. As a result, men placed more importance on working longer hours \u2013 or at least appearing to. Hunnicutt said men he interviewed commonly claimed to have gotten second jobs while they were working six hours. How often is \u201ccommonly\u201d?, he doesn\u2019t say, but he points out only 35% ever did get second jobs. Men felt they \u201chad to\u201d work long hours This attitude, which we might today call \u201ctoxic masculinity,\u201d extended into attitudes about leisure. When asked why they preferred longer hours, men spoke of necessity, and used dramatic language, saying they had to \u201ckeep the wolf from the door,\u201d \u201cfeed the family,\u201d and \u201cput bread on the table.\u201d When Hunnicutt pointed out to men who had been working in the 1950s that workers in the Great Depression had been willing to take pay cuts to have more free time, he says they got defensive, lectured him on \u201cthe facts of life economically,\u201d called six-hours \u201cnonsense\u201d or a \u201cpipe dream,\u201d or dismissed the question as silly. While Hunnicutt\u2019s conclusions here are plausible, it seemed like he really wanted it to be true, and didn\u2019t present men\u2019s attitudes scientifically. There\u2019s no mention of what earnings were relative to cost-of-living, and no acknowledgement of what these men\u2019s roles might have been, truthfully, in the economics of their homes. There\u2019s not even a mention of how throwing thousands of young men into the meat grinder that was WWII, tasked with saving the world, might have affected their own perceptions of what was expected of them. Though he did present a story of one man who had found that the extra money he made going back to eight hours was due to his ex-wife, as alimony. A shorter workday became \u201ca sexist ploy\u201d In the 1970s, Kellogg\u2019s women worked with a local women\u2019s-rights group, who presented the case that six-hour shifts were a sexist ploy meant to subjugate women. They demanded management \u201callow\u201d women to have \u201cfull-time\u201d jobs. Kellogg\u2019s posted notices in the plant claiming that to make pay \u201ccomparable,\u201d they were opening up eight-hour departments to women. In doing so, they skirted the issue: The activists had wanted not just comparable hours, but comparable hourly pay. The 6-hour mavericks held on Workers who stuck with the six-hour shift \u2013 who Hunnicutt calls \u201csix-hour mavericks\u201d \u2013 were about a quarter of the Kellogg\u2019s workforce from 1957, into the 1980s. The union worked according to a department-by-department vote on the length of the day, so long as the six-hour workers didn\u2019t interfere with the union majority\u2019s strategy to try to get higher wages and more benefits. With longer hours, efficiency fell by the wayside Overtime had previously been thought of as a penalty to the company for being understaffed, but it became a way for workers to earn more money while the company\u2019s staffing requirements remained flexible. According to Hunnicutt, with overtime instead of productivity bonuses, workers were less-motivated and careful. The company had to resort to being more controlling, motivating workers with fines, threats, and firings. The death of the 6-hour shift The increased benefits the union had fought for over the years may have worked against the six-hour shift. The final nail in the coffin was driven in 1984, when Kellogg\u2019s threatened to relocate if workers didn\u2019t vote to abandon the six-hour shift. So the six-hour workers gave in and voted to give it up. Some retired, some worked eight hours, but the coffin in which this nail was driven was both figurative and literal. The six-hour workers held a \u201cfuneral,\u201d building a full-sized cardboard coffin, painted black, placed on the workroom floor, a cut-out skeleton placed inside. Thus reversed a trend that had held on for over 150 years. The idea of less work and more leisure gave way to a stable amount of work, and more consumption. It\u2019s tempting to blame the death of the 6-hour shift on one of many juicy narratives. You could say people forgot how to spend their leisure time. You could say people were overly-materialistic, and wanted more money, instead of time. You could say toxic masculinity and a patriarchal society tipped the scales so those who wanted to work shorter hours were no longer in the majority. You could say the unions got too demanding and sabotaged the long-fought battle for a shorter working day. All these are probably true to an extent. Ultimately, businesses want to, need to, maximize profit. They have to offer benefits to employees to stay competitive. To offer those benefits profitably, they need more work from fewer workers. If you believe the efficient-market hypothesis, if a shorter workday were indeed more profitable, some business would beat its competitors by offering one, and other businesses would follow suit. So far, that hasn\u2019t happened. If, as I believe, creativity becomes more important, productivity will be about [Mind Management, Not Time Management, and a more-relaxed work schedule will be embraced. But probably not for boxing corn flakes. There\u2019s your summary of Kellogg\u2019s 6-Hour Day This episode is essentially a summary of the book, Kellogg\u2019s 6-Hour Day, by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. The book is very dense and written in an academic style, so I can\u2019t recommend it unless you really want to dig deep into questions about work and leisure. It\u2019s a provocative story that makes you wonder if we could be living in a world where a 6-hour day is standard. But it sounds like it wasn\u2019t even close. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon \u00bb       Show notes: https:\/\/kadavy.net\/blog\/posts\/kelloggs-6-hour-day\/ ","author_name":"Love Your Work","author_url":"http:\/\/kadavy.net\/blog\/archive\/love-your-work\/","html":"