Dunsmuir, Calif. - One of the more intriguing chapters in labor history involves a decision by the Kellogg Company in 1930 to cut workers' hours from a 40- to a 30-hour week. We could learn a thing or two from this example.
At the outset of the Depression, the company figured this would create 300 more jobs. Company President Lewis Brown also hoped it would give workers more time to spend with their families and to participate in their communities, and that it would lead to "higher standards" in school and civic life.
Yes, the president of a major U.S. corporation actually said that - and apparently meant it.
Workers did use their extra time off for gardening, visiting libraries and family activities, according to reporters' accounts, a 1996 book titled Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, and a study by the U.S. Department of Labor. Most of the workers seemed to embrace the trade-off.
We have since come to accept a different idea, one that puts us in the role of consumers who aim to maximize our working hours and income. To what gain?
Now that we're in a deep recession, I wonder if we might be more open to the lessons of the Kellogg experiment - which lasted until 1985 - as well as to the words of a fellow who lived next to a pond near Concord, Mass.: "Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? ... [We] are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life."
Henry David Thoreau built his own 10-by-15-foot cabin at Walden Pond for $28 in materials. His furniture consisted of a table, a chair and a bed.
In Thoreau's day, a largely self-sufficient rural economy was just beginning to give way to an economy based on mass production and consumption. He sensed its danger.
When the Kellogg experiment was launched, the country was already headed in a direction that one business leader of the time described as "the gospel of consumption." Slowed by the Depression, the direction came into full flower after World War II, nurtured by an increasingly pervasive and sophisticated advertising industry.
Now most of us have been thoroughly indoctrinated in that gospel. But what if, in this shrinking economy, we learned from the Kellogg example and instead of laying people off, U.S. businesses first cut back hours? Some companies are already trying that approach.
