File spoon-archives/marxism-news.archive/marxism-news_1997/marxism-news.9707, message 73


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."

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