Quit Your Job and Get Big Raises Book

Beyond utility, beyond the marketplace. Even a mere two hours a day is revolutionary. It's 1931 and the Kellogg's cereal company has cut two hours from shifts at a Detroit factory complex, introducing a four-shift day and more leisure. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt's study looks at this cultural phenomenon using interviews with workers and labor history pre-Depression to the 70s and 80s. There are also modern interviews with the workers. BKH is a professor of leisure, so the books serves as longform meditation on the question: Why is 9-to-5 still the standard?

BKH presents a lot of answers. Worker attitudes, the shift to Human Relations, and, today's most apparent, leisure consumerism are a few. Many workers simply didn't want the shift. They needed money, overtime, and didn't know what to do with themselves. Less work means more free time and several workers couldn't decide what to do with themselves' they NEEDED to work. Though BKH balances his findings, there are funny reactions to his questions for members of the Greatest Generation who worked at Kellogg's. They question his sanity, ask "Can't you find something worthwhile to waste your time with?" and "...You should do research about something else' you say you study leisure? Does your college pay you to do this? (146). A true idler indeed!

Both pro-leisure and pro-work, which aren't necessarily distinct camps, sling mud. Loafers railed against "work-hogs," one reacts to a modern TV commercial for a national investment firm as "Horseshit...They do less real work than anybody and shout the loudest about it." But, that said, pro-workers do a lot more idlebashing. The culture at Kellogg's comes to feminize idling, pulling the sexist card to guilt male workers into voting a return to 8 hours. A shift in company culture rebrands leisure as frivolous and as an existential nightmare which several of the workers were struggling with. Is doing nothing too hard or have we just learned work as a habit? Furthermore, a return to 8 means the closing of the fourth shift, meaning layoffs, and a shift towards overtime' "'Now management is thinking of quantity' ' instead of people and their need to work'" reports one interviewee (162).

These sentiments were manufactured from the top down. The shift from Scientific Management to Human Relations during the 1950s paves the way: managers ask how can we humanize work? They begin reframing it as pious, essential, and a fulfilling purposeful act. I find this rather sinister, and think the book does too. It finds leisure capitalism the same. Lets use money to take the 'drudgery' out of free time. Good god. And if we can pay to make our leisure more easy to sit with, then we are shifting the idea of leisure from a pure, home-and-community centered culture to a culture of consumption. This EP Thompson quote opens the Reaffirming Work as Life's Center chapter: 'In a mature Capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labor force merely to "pass the time".'

Pro-leisure workers noticed. At a company ballgame during the six-hour era: "You had characters in the stands, yelling and telling stories. Kids would be all over playing. I could tell you stories from now till dark. But now it's all professional and impersonal and just for the money, nobody has time for local sports' all that money has ruined things (174)." Or the woman who teaches her hobby, birding: "That is what I try to teach'doing it for the love of it' you know that's what amateur means, don't you? (176)." It seems they take a greater interest in learned things, some even pursuing an education with their idle time. Interviewee Velma Plumb asks whether BKH has ever heard of Arnold Toynbee, a British social thinker, to which he says no, and she responds "Anyone going to college should have heart of Arnold Toynbee… I recall reading…'We will either share the work or take care of people who don't have work'" (163).

"Those who still doubt that work is life's center are considered heremetics, and time outside work and consumption, without "entertainment" and life's new toys, is a new wilderness (12)." Sadly, the shorter hours movement at Kellogg's is done, but not dead' dormant. As the 8-hour day rears its head in other ways, such as a glut of self-improvement dogmas, environmental effects, or the hollowness of consumer-leisure's blatantly false front, a movement that posits the idea that time spent with oneself on private pursuits is positive is well worth a look. Here's to the mavericks. Here's to the wild hermits.