In Gyeonggi in May, the mountains are full of wild flowers.

Tongzhou, east of Beijing, has always had a prominent status, especially now, and there is a saying that there are one Beijing, two guards and three Tongzhou. In the entire North China region, Beijing ranked first, Tianjin second, and Tongzhou ranked third, even surpassing Baoding, the capital of Hebei Province.

Tongzhou is located in the southeast of Beijing, and it is also the north end of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal and the east gate of Beijing.

The population of one government and three counties exceeded one million.

It is bordered by Jingshi in the west, Tianjin in the east, and Baoding in the south, and is located in the alluvial flood plain of Yongding River and Chaobai River, with flat terrain. There are dozens of large and small rivers in the territory, and the canals are meandering, like swimming dragons; The Chaobai River is a thousand acres of blue waves, and the fishing songs are sung late.

Today, Tongzhou is no longer only a relay station connecting Tianjin to Beijing, nor does it rely on transshipment. Today, Tongju is a light industrial base that Gyeonggi focuses on.

It is also the core privy position of the Bohai Economic Circle, which is the latest proposal of the reshuffled cabinet. At the latest cabinet meeting, Yuan Jixian, the first assistant, put forward the idea of developing the Bohai Economic Circle, which refers to a large area formed by the coastal areas surrounding the Bohai Sea and parts of the Yellow Sea, which is also the most important Gyeonggi zone, the northern coastal gold coast.

The Bohai Rim region includes the two municipalities directly under the central government of Beijing and Tianjin, as well as Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, Liaoning, and southern Monan.

It is mainly based on the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region as the core, with the Liaodong Peninsula and the Shandong Peninsula as the two wings.

At a time when the southern coastal areas are becoming more and more economically developed, the north, as the political and military center of the Han Dynasty, certainly cannot lag behind. In order to develop the economy of Gyeonggi, the Bohai Rim Economic Zone, which was jointly developed by five provinces and two governments, was finally established.

In the Bohai Rim economic development plan proposed by the cabinet, Tongzhou is an important link. Beijing, Tianjin, Tongzhou, Zhangjiakou, Tangshan, Qinhuangdao, Dengzhou, Qingdao, Yantai, Dalian, Lushun, Yingkou and many other cities have been listed as the first batch of key development cities.

Each city has its own focus, such as Zunhua, the northeastern part of Suncheonfu. In the past, there used to be a very large-scale Zunhua Iron Works. After the founding of the Han Dynasty, the focus was on the development of the coal and steel industry, and Zunhua became one of the five major steel industry bases in the Han Dynasty, ranking ahead of the four major steel towns of Hankou, Fengzhou, Foshan and Anshan in terms of scale.

Tianjin's focus is on shipbuilding, export trade and shipping, while Tongzhou's focus is on light industries such as transportation and textiles. Each city has its own focus. The Cabinet will provide guidance and support in terms of policy.

After the Bohai Economic Circle plan. The Cabinet is also planning to build the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone and the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone.

It can be seen that the newly formed cabinet is ready to go unleashed and vigorously work to strengthen economic construction in an all-round way.

But at this time, when it was a good time, there was a problem in a shoe factory in Tongzhou, which alarmed the emperor. Liu Jun even convened the cabinet and important officials of Zhili and Shuntianfu after the Dragon Boat Festival, and formed a huge inspection team to quietly descend on Tongzhou.

In just a few days. Liu Jun led a group of senior officials from the imperial court and local governments to inspect hundreds of enterprises in Tongzhou. Spinning mills, weaving mills, tanneries, shoe factories, garment factories, food processing factories.

Tongzhou officials have done a lot of practical things in recent years, they have established a number of brand-new industrial parks, and placed those related enterprises together, such as the footwear and clothing industrial park, which not only has a shoe and garment factory, but also a related tannery, midsole, outsole factory, insole factory, shoelace factory, buckle factory, trim factory, etc., giving full play to the industrial advantages. It has become an upstream and downstream industrial chain.

The government even organized many people in the vicinity and supported them to set up many family processing workshops. OEM production and external processing services for manufacturers, which greatly helps factories with many orders and busy business to solve some troubles of insufficient labor.

However, in the course of the inspection, many problems were also exposed.

For example, most of the wages of ordinary workers in factories are not paid monthly, and some are even paid once every six months or once a year. At the end of the year, salaries will be suppressed. The other is that overtime hours are long, and most of them are not paid overtime. In addition, wages are generally low, and workers have to work more than 10 hours a day in the factory, getting up early and working in the dark, and the result is often that the average salary is less than three yuan a month.

There are also some problems. It is because the government has not been able to provide more services to the East Factory, such as the factory has good business, has many orders, and wants to expand, but the funds are insufficient and need to borrow, but the bank has difficulty in financing, and even various approvals. The official did not take the initiative to help manufacturers solve the problem of financing.

In addition, there are many fees charged by the government under various names, such as sanitation fees, public security fees, patrol fees, inspection fees, etc., and the additional burden borne by the manufacturers is very heavy. There were even many yamen who came to the door to fine, and the merchants were sometimes miserable.

At the Yamen of the prefect of Tongzhou, Liu Jun summed up the results of the inspection with a group of ministers.

"The central government and Tongzhou local government for Tongzhou positioning the development of light industry and transportation industry, which is very accurate, backed by Beijing, Tianjin two million population of the city, surrounded by the Bohai Circle, the most prosperous circle in the north, Tianjin development of light industry has a great excellence, has excellent prospects. But there are also many issues that you have overlooked. ”

"During this micro-service inspection, many workers are lamenting that it is difficult to make money, the work is too tiring, and the boss is always in arrears, low wages, and long working hours. Manufacturers have been complaining that there is a shortage of workers, lack of people, and lack of money. The government does not help with financing, all kinds of approvals are difficult to run, and there are many assessments and fines in the yamen, and the additional costs are very high. ”

"There is also the problem of triangular debt, the goods are sold to collect the payment for a long time, and the manufacturer owes the wages of material suppliers and workers, forming a dangerous triangular debt relationship, once an accident occurs, it will be dangerous upstream and downstream."

Liu Jun hopes that those officials in the central cabinet of the imperial court, when formulating policies, will not only look at the surface data, but also look at the specific situation below. Local officials also need to be more pragmatic, acting as good managers and good participants.

"We need to change our style of work now, and we also need to enact a law, a labor law, to clarify the rights and responsibilities of employers and workers, and protect the rights and interests of both parties, especially the rights and interests of workers. I hope that in this labor law, there is a clear minimum monthly wage standard, stipulating the number of working hours per day, and overtime pay if the excess hours are calculated. There must also be a clear standard for the minimum overtime pay per hour, and overtime on holidays should be doubled. Workers' salaries must be paid monthly, and they must not be in arrears or deducted for any reason. Pre-job training is required for dangerous jobs, and manufacturers must also purchase work-related injury insurance for workers in dangerous jobs."

"I suggest that the minimum wage in the factory be set at four yuan!"

"All localities should set up a special labor bureau and set up a trade union. Specifically to provide protection for the rights and interests of these workers. ”

The officials attending the meeting were very shaken.

After the meeting, Yuan Jixian and Liu Jun had a separate conversation.

"If this labor law is forcefully enforced, I am afraid that it will pour cold water on the current economic situation. The minimum monthly wage of four yuan is only afraid that many small-scale factories, especially some small processing workshops, are estimated to be unable to open. ”

Liu Jun said, "I know very well that businessmen make money from exploitation, but with the current standard of living. The salary of four yuan a month is not high, or even very low. If a worker drafts in the dark, working day after day for a month, without even four yuan, life will be difficult. ”

Now is not the end of the Ming Dynasty, at that time, if you can have more than one tael of silver a month. Life will be good. But now, four silver dollars a month. It is enough to support yourself, but it is barely enough to support your family.

"The teacher knows about the barrel, right?"

Yuan Jixian didn't know why the emperor suddenly mentioned the barrel.

"A wooden barrel is made up of many wooden planks, and the amount of water that the barrel can hold is determined by these planks. However, if one of the planks is very short, the amount of water can be limited by the shortcoming. This shortcoming has become a restriction on the water in the barrel, so it can be said. The most critical plank of a barrel is not the longboard, nor the vast majority of planks, but the shortest one. ”

So we can say that it doesn't make sense to be higher than the lowest plank. The more you get, the more waste you have. In order to increase the capacity of the barrel, the most important thing we need to do is to envisage the shortest plank, which is also an effective and only effective way. ”

The analogy of a wooden barrel made Yuan Jixian understand it all of a sudden.

The emperor was ostensibly talking about wooden barrels, but in fact he was talking about the governance of the country. For the country, the water in the bucket is the wealth of the country, and the country can only be strong when it is rich, but if the country is to be strong, it must rely on all levels of society.

Those who are on the board are the aristocrats, officials, and wealthy businessmen who occupy the upper positions in the country, and the shortcomings are undoubtedly the people at the bottom, that is, those ordinary people.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the planks of wooden barrels were generally very short, and some were even short to the bottom of the barrel, so even if some of the planks were extremely long, they had little effect on the barrel of the entire Ming Dynasty.

It can even be considered from another angle, in fact, all the planks were originally sawn off a plank, but because the saws are long and short, the result is a long and short board. The long board is too long and the short board is too short, in fact, the length occupies the long board of the short board, which is a waste of resources.

"Water can carry a boat, and it can also capsize a boat. If it is replaced by this barrel theory, it means that the imperial court needs to pay more attention to the shortcomings, that is, the rights and interests of those people at the bottom. If the people can eat well, wear warm clothes, enjoy education, and have the opportunity to go out into business and change their fate, this shows that the short board has been lengthening, and the short board is lengthened, and the barrel of the Han Empire can hold more water and be more stable. ”

"Nowadays, the Han Dynasty has opened up countless territories, and the newly opened territories have been reclaimed, which has greatly alleviated the problem of land annexation. But Dahan has a population of more than 300 million, and there is still a huge surplus labor force, if everyone only focuses on that bit of land, then everyone can only live a poor life. ”

"The imperial court attached great importance to industry and commerce, and supported merchants to open factories, trade transactions, and let goods circulate. More surplus labor has the opportunity to work, can earn more money, and the rich commodity economy can also allow everyone to enjoy more goods. This is a virtuous circle, the more developed the commodity economy, the more taxes the imperial court can collect in the process of commodity circulation and consumption. ”

"It is a good thing and the trend of the times that a large number of rural surplus labor people have entered the factories, but we must not allow these people who have left the land to end up in slavery to the factory owners. Think about the previous dynasty, the land annexation was serious, and a large number of people became landless, and they could not find so many job opportunities now, so they could only rent and cultivate for the landlords, and even became slaves, and they could only barely make ends meet.

"Now a large number of surplus rural laborers have poured into the cities, into the factories, and gathered in the mines, and this situation is much more sensitive than that scattered in the vast rural areas.

Liu Jun said that these are not empty words, but serious.

Historically, many rebellions were all conscripts who built the Great Wall, repaired river embankments, and transported military rations, and the people who were dissatisfied with the court like powder kegs were gathered together again.

In the industrial age, a large number of rural people poured into the cities and into the factories. Their pay is low, their lives are poor, their work is still hard, and they have been depressed for a long time.

It was not in this situation that all kinds of bourgeois revolutions and the like arose.

Liu Jun didn't want to go all out to develop the economy by himself, so he ended up getting a group of greedy capitalists, and then forced countless workers to jump up and make a revolution because they couldn't stand it.

The French Revolution cut off the emperor's head. Even the British parliamentary war cut off the king's head.

For Emperor Liu Jun, the Han Dynasty should develop the economy, and only when the economy is alive can the people live well and the country become rich and strong. But he also had to prevent the strength of those emerging capitalists from swelling too much, and these big capitalists rose up and were born to be the opponents of the feudal imperial power.

And those workers must fully protect their rights and interests, or they will end up standing opposite the emperor as well. Although there are many reasons for the demise of the Han Dynasty, one of them must be that many peasants could not survive and rebelled for many years, which caused great harm to the Ming Dynasty.

"Teacher, more and more factories have been established, and now some of the workers in the factories are just farmers who come to the factories to earn some money to subsidize their families. But in the future, more and more people will definitely enter the factory to work, and will completely leave the village, from the land, to become pure workers, the number of these people will be very large in the future, how to protect the rights and interests of these people, in fact, we also take precautions, in advance to avoid a lot of trouble. ”

"After returning to Beijing, Lao Chen immediately drafted a labor law and submitted it to the Senate for review." Yuan Jixian Road.

Liu Jun nodded with satisfaction. (To be continued.) )