The Six-Hour Day

On December 1, 1930, W. K. Kellogg replaced three eight hour shifts at his Battle Creek plant with four six hour shifts. The Depression was emptying factories. Kellogg wanted more people on the payroll. Workers got a higher hourly rate and took home somewhat less each day. Kellogg claimed the plant ran cheaper and safer.

Washington briefly agreed. In April 1933 the Senate passed Hugo Black's thirty hour bill. It never became law. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 instead set a path toward a forty hour week. The national clock stopped at eight hours a day, while Battle Creek kept running at six.

The war pushed Kellogg to longer shifts in 1943, with a promise to bring six hours back. In 1946 the workers voted to keep the shorter day. Then the ground shifted. Union leaders preferred wage gains to free time, and management began calling longer days progress. Men moved to eight hours first.

In 1985 the last departments at Battle Creek converted to eight hours. Benjamin Hunnicutt, the historian who recovered the story, argues the experiment never failed. Workers came to want more hours so they could buy more. Robert Whaples, reviewing the book, noted that Hunnicutt casts the six hour loyalists as heroes and the converts as selfish.

Both readings leave the same strange fact. A schedule that its owner promoted and its workers once voted to keep ended by their own ballot. Nothing in the body fixes the number eight. It survives because people with a real choice kept choosing it, and the clock still stops where they left it.