Review

Reviewed Work(s): Kellogg's Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt

Review by: Ellen Mutari
Source: Review of Social Economy , WINTER 1998, Vol. 56, No. 4, SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE
SOCIAL ECONOMICS OF WORK TIME (WINTER 1998), pp. 543-546
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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 REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY

Book Reviews

Kellogg's Six-Hour Day. By Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1996,261 pp., $24.96 paperback.

"Only an idiot would think you can get as much working less instead of more
hours a week," declared a Kellogg worker interviewed for this study in 1989 (53).
During the postwar period, U.S. workers have perceived themselves as facing a
choice between wages and shorter hours ? and most have chosen wages. In this
insightful book, Hunnicutt argues forcefully against the way that this choice has
been constructed. He uses a case study of 6-hour shifts at the Kellogg's company
in Battle Creek, Michigan, to illustrate the trend away from shorter hours in the
twentieth century. Four 6-hour shifts replaced three 8-hour shifts for nearly all of
the plant's departments in 1930, specifically as a work-sharing measure in
response to the onset of the Great Depression. Hourly wages were increased so
that workers would not bear the cost of work sharing. The policy was gradually
repealed during the postwar period, though some workers continued to cherish
shorter shifts until 1985.
W.K. Kellogg, the creator (along with older brother John Harvey Kellogg) of
the corn flake, did not accept the conventional wisdom expressed by the
contemporary worker quoted above. In 1935, he asserted:

We have found that, with the shorter working day, the efficiency and morale of our
employees is [sic] so increased, the accident and insurance rates are so improved,
and the unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for
six hours as we formerly paid for eight (35).

Hunnicutt is less concerned with empirical evidence substantiating or

contradicting Kellogg's claim than with the changing consciousness of workers
themselves.

Review of Social Economy Vol LVI No. 4 Winter 1998 ISSN 0034 6764
? 1998 The Association for Social Economics

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 REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY

Kellogg's philosophy exemplifies "Liberation Capitalism," according to the

author. He defines Liberation Capitalism as a belief that economic progress and
productivity increases would result in the satisfaction of human necessities. This
would enable humans to spend less time at paid employment and to have the
freedom to engage in more fulfilling forms of activity. Thus, proponents of this
philosophy believed that the U.S. was entering an "Age of Leisure."
This vision was undermined by a "New Economic Gospel of Consumption"
during the post-war period. The political and economic coalition that emerged
during the New Deal emphasized the goal of continuous economic expansion and
work creation. As noted by Hunnicutt, "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" became the watchword
of political campaigns. Economic growth was predicated upon "perpetual
consumerism and ever-expanding needs" (120). Hunnicutt argues that this
resulted from a cultural shift as much as from political and economic forces.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide an overview of these theoretical issues, drawing upon
the themes developed in Hunnicutt's previous book, Work Without End:
Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Temple University Press,
1988). Chapter 1 also provides insight into the key actors who instituted the work
sharing policy at Kellogg's. At first, a majority of workers embraced the policy, as
demonstrated by archival sources and retrospective interviews described in
Chapter 3. While this support was in part motivated by an ethical commitment to
job sharing during the economic crisis, workers also appreciated the freedom and
opportunity to pursue family and community activities. Kellogg himself
encouraged and sponsored leisure activities such as gardening, community sports,
libraries, and culture. The interviews reveal that the workers themselves disputed
Kellogg's claim that weekly wages did not fall, although most were satisfied with
the trade-off.
The heart of the book (chapters 4 through 7) describes the unraveling of the
shorter-hours policy. After the plant unionized in late 1936, W.K. Kellogg
withdrew from the daily management of the company. The new managers lacked
his paternalistic vision. After World War II, a labor-management coalition
increasingly supported a return to 8-hour shifts and cuts in the work force, coupled
with higher hourly wages. Male-dominated departments were at the forefront of
this coalition. The union, led by male workers in relatively high-paid jobs,
pursued bread-and-butter wage increases and the expansion of "full-time work."
Hunnicutt eloquently describes how the shorter work shifts were gradually
"feminized," that is, viewed as the province of women, the infirm, and older
workers. The hours discrepancy was used to justify gender-based wage
disparities. In the mid-1970s, some of the women workers, with the support of
local feminist organizations, brought a lawsuit protesting hours distinctions as a
form of gender discrimination. The company opened up jobs in the 8-hour

544

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 BOOK REVIEWS

departments to women applicants but deflected the issue of comparable hourly

wages. However, the departments with six-hour shifts remained female
dominated enclaves.
Eventually, according to Hunnicutt, leisure itself became feminized. The
cultural value of work increased, while leisure became synonymous with passive
consumption. Paid work was central to the identity of the male workers
interviewed. Only a minority of workers, mostly female, continued to defy efforts
to institute 8-hour shifts plant-wide. Hunnicutt labels them the "Six-Hour
Mavericks" (Chapter 8). Ironically, it was another major economic dislocation?
the wave of downsizing and capital flight of the early 1980s?that finally ended
the last of the 6-hour shifts. In Chapter 9, Hunnicutt (too briefly) describes how
Kellogg management used competitive pressures and the threat of relocation to
achieve this.
Part of the outstanding Temple University Press series on "Labor and Social
Change," Kellogg 's Six-Hour Day documents an important story in labor history.
The Kellogg case study is used to raise significant issues about the meaning of
work and other activities in peoples' lives. Hunnicutt uses both his own interviews
and others conducted by the U.S. Women's Bureau in 1932 to vividly illustrate
how the discourse about work has changed. In so doing, he challenges the primacy
of "economic man and woman" at the heart of labor economics, that is, economic
actors motivated by their desire for consumption goods. Further, he maintains that
the primacy of work as a source of identity is recent and problematic. Instead,
Hunnicutt calls for a return to valuing "leisure," distinguished from work by being
"free time" under the control of the individual. This time is actively lived, not
passively spent, as in joining a softball league rather than watching sports on
television.
Hunnicutt is a professor of leisure studies and thus views leisure as a "cultural
asset" (55). Part of his project is to contrast work as a realm of necessity and
leisure as a realm of freedom. Much of his discourse analysis focuses on this
contrast between freedom and necessity. However, his concept of work and
leisure could benefit from greater attention to the feminist literature on social
reproduction, especially the work of Nancy Folbre and Susan Himmelweit on
caring labor. Although he is careful to distinguish between men's and women's
major activities outside paid employment and extensively discusses the
importance of home duties and caregiving in women's lives, he is too facile in
constituting a clear divide between "work" and "leisure." Women do not
necessarily experience the household as a realm of freedom and control.
The story of the 6-hour day at Kelloggs ends in 1985, amid profound changes
in the Michigan industrial-based economy. Hunnicutt therefore misses the
opportunity to reflect upon the prospects for a revival of a shorter hours

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 REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY

movement. The shift in the labor movement and worker consciousness away from
shorter hours and towards high-wages and "full-time" employment was part of the
New Deal order that is now unraveling. Keynesian demand management, the
welfare state, and stable, unionized jobs (in some sectors, for some workers) were
all part and parcel of the Age of Consumption. To the extent these good, high
wage jobs are being replaced by poorer quality jobs, will workers reprioritize
toward seeking shorter work hours? Or has the commodification of leisure made
this unlikely? These questions might have strengthened the lesson of the book,
making it more than the recording of something now passed.
Nevertheless, this book is an important contribution to the interdisciplinary
literature on working time. Further, because it addresses fundamental issues about
the scope and purpose of economic activity, the nature of economic growth, and
the premises of conventional models of the labor market, this book should be of
interest to economists in a number of fields. Social economists will especially
appreciate the author's attention to the interaction between cultural values and
economic institutions.

Ellen Mutari
Monmouth University

Work and Idleness: The Political Economy of Full Employment. Series on

Recent Economic Thought. Edited by Jane Wheelock and John Vail. Boston/
Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, 1998, $99.95 hardcover.

This book is an ambitious attempt to survey thinking about work and idleness. The
contributions are equally split between economists and social policy analysts.
Following an introduction by the editors, the book is organized into respective
sections of different theoretical perspectives, evaluations of work among
demographic groups, and alternative blueprints for policy.
Chapter 2 by John Wells examines the determination of employment from a
Keynesian perspective. The chapter begins with an account of the neoclassical
(i.e. non-Keynesian) approach to labor markets which emphasizes their automatic
and rapid self-equilibrating properties. It then presents some recent developments
in this tradition that explain why labor markets may adjust slowly and exhibit
permanent involuntary unemployment. The cause of such unemployment lies not
with the individual worker but with structural features of the labor market. These
features include excessive trade union power which prevents wages from falling.
The policy focus of this new approach is labor market reform that aims to remove
structural impediments: this includes weakening unions and employment

546

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