As the AI revolution heralds a new dawn – or living nightmare – in the world of work, I find my thoughts turning increasingly to Kellogg’s. Yes, the cereal company, and not just because cereal is all I have time to eat in between my many jobs.
The Kellogg’s factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, was where, in the early 20th century, the dream of a world free of work and rich in recreation first took off – and even, for a few brief shining years, soared. In 1930, the “managed work reduction” movement – seeking to take advantage of the productivity gains enabled by automation to usher in a golden age of leisure – found an influential champion in WK Kellogg.
Intrigued by the utopian possibilities, Kellogg opted to shorten his factory’s workday from eight hours to six, and increased daily shifts from three to four. The 30-hour working week was widely taken up by US business leaders as a smart and progressive strategy – not just protecting against the threat of mass unemployment caused by mechanisation, but also spreading the benefits. Forbes magazine reported the following year that “thinking men in industry are saying … ‘Shorter hours for men and longer hours for machines’.”
By the 1932 US presidential election, the six-hour workday was the favoured solution to national unemployment, and hours were expected to continue to decline nationally. “No one thought it would stop,” says historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, the author of Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day and Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. “For the most part, people were optimistic: the definition of progress was higher wages and shorter hours.”
And yet what we wound up with, not just in the US but globally – as you will doubtless be aware – was not “mass leisure” or even shorter days made possible by machines, but longer hours spent toiling on them. By 1940, support for managed work reduction had all but evaporated, reflecting missteps by government, labour and industry – and a breakdown in mutual commitment to the vision.
Today the dream of “work reduction” is long dead, even forgotten. OECD data shows that the average time spent on leisure has decreased since the 1980s, even in economies (such as the UK’s) that have grown in that time. Official time-use statistics suggest that recreation has been declining even since 2020, particularly for women, younger people and those on lower incomes.
Time is money, they say – but it seems many of us feel impoverished in both. Recent research by Lloyds Bank found that the average Briton has only 23 “genuinely free” hours a week (from a total of 168). And 86% of respondents said they needed more.
But the Lloyds report had a sunny spin, proclaiming that “emerging technology” could free up nearly two hours a day within the next two years. It casts a wide net, pointing to robot vacuum cleaners and driverless cars (and Lloyds’s new banking tools!), along with further advances in automation and AI, as capable of creating more time in our day.
These shifts are already under way. Many people in all lines of work are routinely using AI tools such as ChatGPT – and for more involved, consequential or sensitive tasks than you may imagine. ChatGPT can achieve in seconds work that could take a person hours, often to a passable degree. But are the time savings created going towards more free time or more work?
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has predicted that AI will replace people “for most things” within a decade, ushering in a two-day working week (and a five-day weekend). And yet, right now, even a four-day working week seems like a pipe dream, let alone the drastic measures (such as universal basic income) that will be necessary to absorb the shock of mass redundancy.
Even we, the workers, are sleepwalking towards the future. From my reporting, it seems people are using ChatGPT not to clock off earlier, or even on time, but to get more done and keep on top of their seemingly endless workload.
A century ago, there was a collective desire and will to use technology to manage work, underpinned by the belief that leisure was akin to freedom. It was assumed that people would make choices to free up more time to spend with family, or on their hobbies. But that vision was tested – and eventually crushed – by the emerging view of progress as more money with which to buy more things, and of work as “the centre of life”. The Kellogg’s workers eventually voted in 1983 to abandon the six-hour shift, swayed by the threat of redundancies – and the promise of pay rises. Overtime was widely seen as a fair trade-off for less leisure. As one dissenting employee put it: “The work hogs won.”
I first learned this in 2020 from an article by Hunnicutt. Reading of the flagging commitment of Kellogg’s to the six-hour shift made me feel the same agonised paralysis as watching a character in a horror film drift towards a slow and painful death. “Nooo!” I wanted to shout. “It’s a trap!”
I fear we are at a similar crossroads now. New technologies really could give us more free time, shift the locus of life and meaning away from work, and even restructure society towards recreation and connection; they will replace vast numbers of us in our jobs. We already know that hard limits to growth exist, even if we fail to meaningfully acknowledge them. How we weather the change ahead will depend on our vision and daring, and how big we are prepared to dream.
It’s not enough to recognise the possibilities, though that’s a start, says Hunnicutt. We need to believe in the merits of leisure, and “non-material growth – something besides more money and more work, forever”. History shows that this “respected, respectable, inspiring, historical alternative” is possible, even under capitalism. But if we don’t fight for our free time, we’ll just find more ways to waste it at work.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
