Note the "Reynolds wanted to keep [...] his employees at work" part. This was at a time where being an employer was understood to come with a responsibility towards the people you employed. Well, at least today people have 40 hour work weeks with the weekends off.
Hard to know for sure, but it might well have been more self-serving than that: good employees might have been hard to come by, and hard to re-acquire/retrain once lost, so maybe he just wanted to keep them around and occupied so that they'd still be available once demand rose again.
