during the war and the majority of them were ready to return
to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them were
able to do so, for a while. But W. K. Kellogg and Lewis Brown
had turned the company over to new managers in 1937.
The new managers saw only costs and no bene>ts to the
six-hour day, and almost immediately after the end of the
war they began a campaign to undermine shorter hours.
Management o=ered workers a tempting set of >nancial
incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a
vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of
the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather
than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also
chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from arti>cially
high wartime levels.
The company responded with a strategy of attrition,
o=ering special deals on a department-by-department basis
where eight hours had pockets of support, typically among
highly skilled male workers. In the culture of a post-war,
post-Depression U.S., that strategy was largely successful.
But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a
substantial, albeit slowly dwindling group of people
Hunnicutt calls the “mavericks,” who resisted longer work
hours. They clustered in a few departments that had
managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company
eliminated it once and for all in 1985.
The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company,
the union, and many of their co-workers that the extra money
they could earn on an eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite
the enormous di=erence in societal wealth between the 1930s
and the 1980s, the language the mavericks used to explain
their preference for a six-hour workday was almost identical
to that used by Kellogg workers >fty years earlier. One
woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son,
said, “He has no time to live, to visit and spend time with his
family, and to do the other things he really loves to do.”
Several people commented on the link between longer
work hours and consumerism. One man said, “I was getting
along real good, so there was no use in me working any more
time than I had to.” He added, “Everybody thought they were
going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it
really didn’t make a big di=erence. . . . Some went out and
bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on
that because the car took the extra money they had.”
The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant
fewer jobs, called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus
overtime “work hogs.” “Kellogg’s was laying o= people,” one
woman commented, “while some of the men were working
really fantastic amounts of overtime—that’s just not fair.”
