From: detcom2-AT-sprynet.com Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 09:44:05 -0700 Subject: M-NEWS: Review of 6-hr day at Kelloggs ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 12:53:22 -0700 From: Dave Neal <dtn307-AT-nwu.edu> I made a site with it at: http://pubweb.nwu.edu/~dtn307/sixhour.html The book is "Kellogg's Six-Hour Day" and it must've just come out; the review was July 13, 1997. ====Labor's Love Lost A look at one company's 55-year experiment with a shorter working day By Steve Weinberg In 1930, the W.K. Kellogg cereal plant in Battle Creek, Mich., replaced its traditional eight-hour working shifts with six-hour shifts. A national economic depression was beginning, and by changing from three shifts a day to four, Kellogg created new jobs, including positions for former employees who had been laid off. W.K. Kellogg himself had no intention of intitiating a grand social experiment. After all, why would a two-hours-per-day difference in a worker's schedule be a big deal? But it turned out to be a big deal indeed. The new schedule greatly altered the lives of workers and the area in which they resided. It was no short-term phenomenon, either. Although the six-hour day began to lose support among Kellogg managers and some of the plant's workers during World War II because of an executive order by President Franklin Roosevelt intented to increase production during the war, other workers continued their six-hour shifts until 1985. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, a University of Iowa professor of leisure studies, has mined the 55-year history of the six-hour day at the Kellogg plant. Unlike many books written by academics for university presses, this one is clearly written and clearly relevant. Overwork is a hot topic today. Parents worry about their children being ignored at home because of workplace demands. Employees with and without children wonder why they are working more and more hours when they have been led to believe that technology would increase their leisure time. In studying the Kellogg experiment Hunnicutt found out some things that may provide insight into workplaces circa 1997: The two extra hours away from the workplace tipped the balance between job and leisure activities. Work 'began to lose its place as the dominant social and cultural focus.' Parents flocked to their children's schools to become involved. Housework got finished promptly. Meals served at home became more elaborate. Workers met outside the plant more frequently for picnics or potluck dinners or softball games or Ping-Pong matches. Business at the roller-skating rink thrived. Those who liked to hunt and fish got out more often. Women supported shorter shifts more avidly than the Kellogg men. After experiencing the six-hour workdays, women were especially vocal in criticizing 'the concept of work as the center of life....' After most of the men had deserted the cause, the women continued labor's 150-year tradition, questioning the role of work discipline in their lives, looking more and more to the family, school, and community for meaning and satisfaction, and discovering new kinds of power and status in their time outside industrial capitalism. Regular pay raises for capable work at Kellogg meant that employees could earn nearly as much on the six-hour schedule as on the previous eight-hour schedule. In many respects, the workplace functioned better. Worker health improved. Accidents in the plant decreased. Morale was unquestionably better (good morale can be good business because it often results in greater productivity). Today, employees at Kellogg and millions of other workplaces feel as if they are trapped in a "work without end" cycle. They hang onto their employment in an era of heartless corporate downsizing, but they would rather be away from the office more than they are. Those who do not feel trapped often feel that way for an unhealthy reason: They want to spend as many hours as possible at work because it allows them to escape unpleasantness at home. Hunnicutt worries about such developments. Workers who feel trapped are not productive, and lack of productivity is bad for the economy. Workers who want to be on the job rather than at home are too often neglecting their child-rearing and volunteer activities, thereby weakening the local social structure. Hunicutt concludes: "The memory of shorter hours and the mavericks' fight [to keep their six-hour shifts] remains fresh in Battle Creek, providing at least a glimmer of hope that the workers' historic cause and ... vision of freedom may yet be revived. The Kellogg mavericks were faithful to a vision that endured for over a century and a half: that increased leisure and higher wages *together* constitute authentic progress and that the work hours should ... be reduced from twelve to ten to eight to six and further ... until work and economic concerns become adjuncts to, rather than the centers of, modern life." *-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-*-*-*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* * LEFTLINK - sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop * * http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/ * * Address to post messages to Leftlink: Leftlink-AT-vicnet.net.au * * Address to join or leave Leftlink: majordomo-AT-vicnet.net.au * * To join Leftlink write: subscribe leftlink your-email-address * * To leave Leftlink write: unsubscribe leftlink your-email-address * *-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-*-*-*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-*
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