working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the pro>t
motive becomes “both the creator and satis>er of spiritual
needs.” For when the pro>t motive can turn nowhere else, “it
wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that
is solace to our souls.”
There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg
Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal,
announced that all of its nearly >fteen hundred workers would
move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company
president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if
the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of
three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”
This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country
was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as
Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour
Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They
hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and
labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless
consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural
resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly
higher wages and shorter hours for the >nal freedom promised
by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”
To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a pro>t.
But the company leaders argued that men and women would
work more e;ciently on shorter shifts, and with more people
employed, the overall purchasing power of the community
would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods,
including cereals.
A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers.
But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially o=set the loss and
provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work
hard. The company eliminated time o= for lunch, assuming
that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as
