Trazee In-Depth: Challenging the Status Quo

There are aspects of modern society that have seemingly been in place since the beginning of time, from the way we file our taxes to our weekly work hours. We go about our day to day accepting, for the most part, adult expectations and responsibilities without much question as to why we do things a particular way and whether or not there is another, possibly better, way of doing it.

The generally accepted and widely established work schedule consists of eight-hour days, five days a week, but state planners in Utah found surprising benefits to longer days and shorter workweek.

Traditionally, factory workers worked 16 hours or more a day, nearly every day of the week. This began to take a toll on the employees who would inevitably head to a local tavern after work to unwind. This post-work routine ostensibly led to less effective workdays the next day and an unhealthy work cycle began.

Once this practice became a pattern with overworked factory workers, industry owners were forced to introduce a two-day break in an attempt to reestablish productivity and higher performance, as well as benefiting Jewish and Christian worker’s religious practices. This new schedule became known as the weekend and has mostly remained to this day.

Looking to cut statewide energy use and high costs, Utah city planners established 10-hour workdays over a four-day work week in 2009. The principle test scheduling began with 18,000 state employees and quickly revealed mostly positive and unexpected results.

Preliminary findings proved too early for energy cost benefits, but immediately showed boosts in worker satisfaction, productivity and employee morale. After eight months of the new schedule, 70 percent of state employees reportedly preferred the shortened work week to their previous 9–5, five days a week.

Another surprising effect was increased employee productivity. Under the new schedule, employees were reportedly more productive, at their desks more often working and taking fewer days off.

With far less commuter traffic on the roads on Fridays, the state began to see a 13 percent energy decrease after the first year. There are still energy challenges to tackle, such as the heating and cooling systems being turned off each Friday in empty office buildings, but the reduced individual carbon footprints were an encouraging start to such a wide-scale commute cutback.

Although the initial change proved stressful and difficult for some, overall the general consensus was a positive work environment for employees and lower costs for overtime and paid time off from employers.

When considering the aspects of our daily adult lives and all it entails, Benjamin Franklin’s famous words, “In this world nothing can be certain, except death and taxes”, still rings true. Every year, Americans collectively spend billions of dollars filing taxes, checking returns and paying back taxes to the government. This is not necessarily the case around the world.

In a recent interview with Ari Shapiro on National Public Radio, Stanford professor Joseph Bankman recognized this as a flaw and fought the system in 2004. As a tax law professor, Bankman believed a simpler tax filing system was possible for Americans to not only cut costs personally, but also encourage a less complicated relationship with our nation’s government.

Bankman’s theory was our country’s tax filing system is flawed, overly complicated and retroactively places American citizens and the government at odds with one another.

Bankman and his team developed a tax-filing plan similar to those used around the world with a tax form mostly filled out already. Bankman argued the government already knows what citizens earn annually and can fill out the tax form for them. This way, American workers would simply check the statement to make sure everything was correct before filing. The system was called ReadyReturn and 99 percent of people who tested the program said they would use it again. Bankman took this information and ran with it, hiring a lobbyist and working toward getting the votes required to establish his tax filing system for states across the country to adopt.

Bankman’s short-lived success took off, with nearby states reaching out to use his new system. While on a roll with positive feedback and successful lobbying, Bankman began meeting with tax lawmakers. The meetings were much less encouraging. Intuit, the company that owns TurboTax, reportedly already met with the same lawmakers prior to Bankman’s meetings and lobbied against ReadyReturn, quite successfully.

After a year of lobbying and several years of research and hard work, Bankman was defeated and our tax filing system remained the same and relatively unbothered since.

With so much of our modern society set in place by someone, group or event deep in our history, it can seem daunting to take on a new method. As many generally accepted aspects of our culture came from a struggle that may no longer apply in our modern society, it’s important to keep challenging the industry standard in order to positively move forward. Thinking critically about our environment can effectively educate individuals on how and why we do the things we do, and whether or not it is still the best way.