At the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Ford conducted a series of experiments which demonstrated that his factory workers were most productive when they worked a forty-hour week. Working an additional twenty hours would pay off for four weeks, but after that, productivity declined. Others took his experiments a step further. On December 1, 1930, as the Great Depression was raging, the cornflake magnate W. K. Kellogg decided to introduce a six-hour workday at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees and
...more