In the 41st year of Xuanping, the Tang Empire generally raised the minimum wage based on economic development, and also promulgated the latest version of the labor law in the summer.
The new version of the labor law further protects the rights and interests of workers.
For the first time, the minimum working hours are legally defined as twenty-eight days a month, and the first and fifteenth of each month are legal holidays. At the same time, the maximum working time per working day shall not exceed twelve hours.
At the same time, overtime pay is also stipulated at the legal level. If overtime is required, the overtime pay is one and a half times the regular salary, the statutory holiday pay is three times the regular salary, and the overtime pay on statutory holidays is five times the regular salary.
In addition to the regular holiday arrangements, the Tang Empire will legally stipulate the Spring Festival, Qingming Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Winter Solstice, and Christmas as statutory holidays, with statutory holidays lasting three days each.
At the same time, a new Institutional Labor Department was established under the Ministry of Household Affairs. The responsibility of this department is to study and protect the rights and interests of employment.
In the 41st year of Xuanping, the Tang Empire passed a series of laws and regulations to effectively protect the interests of ordinary working people, promote food and clothing for all people in many aspects, and even move towards the goal of prosperity for all people.
Although the series of policies of the Datang Measures have stipulated minimum wages and statutory holidays at the legal level, they are still more guided.
In practice, it is difficult to get all bosses to pay workers in strict accordance with labor laws and the latest salary standards. This is the nature of capital's pursuit of profit.
There will always be various violations, but Li Xuan is not in a hurry. He just sets the rules first and then does it slowly. If he is too impatient to eat hot tofu, Li Xuan has a lot of time to push it slowly.
With the development of the economy, many things have become a matter of course. All Li Xuan has to do is to prepare and plan in advance, and the next thing will be a matter of course.
For example, when the minimum wage was issued in the early years, the implementation was actually very imperfect. Many companies were unwilling to implement it. Even the workers themselves did not know how to actively demand the minimum wage because they did not know that there was such a thing.
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But now, the concept of minimum wage has been deeply rooted in people's hearts. Even people who have just come to Songjiang Prefecture from their hometown to find a job know that there are minimum monthly wages, minimum daily wages, and even minimum hourly wages.
If the other party's salary is lower than this figure, go out and report it to the Labor Department, and the Labor Department will come to fine you in minutes, and the reporter will also get a bonus!
In the early years, many people just went to work in various places that did not pay the minimum wage. As soon as they started working, they reported the situation. Getting a bonus would make them happy for a long time.
There are many people who don't know the concept for a while. It doesn't matter, just take your time. Li Xuan has never been in a hurry about this kind of thing.
Of course, Li Xuan never plays with boiling frogs in warm water, because frogs are not stupid, let alone whether the water is hot or not. Even if you haven't even lit the fire, they will jump away and run away. Silly, you will stay here.
Slowly stewed, those are stupid frogs...
Li Xuan's favorite thing to do is boil frogs in a pressure cooker. The lid of this thing is very tight. No matter how much the frog jumps inside, it is impossible to escape. Then it would be delicious to simmer over low heat...
This can be reflected in many policies of the Tang Empire.
The implementation of many policies of the Tang Empire has been carried out for decades, and there is great policy coherence. It will not be said that rural subsidies are implemented this year and will not be implemented next year.
If nothing else happens, the Tang Empire will continue to play like this next year.
For example, the Tang Empire was engaged in the construction of large-scale water conservancy facilities, especially the management projects of the Yellow River, Huaihe River, Yangtze River and other rivers. It started after the end of the Unification War and has not stopped until now...
In order to completely regulate the Huaihe River, the Tang Empire built a massive Hongze Lake embankment.
Countless boulders, cement and steel bars and other materials were used. The main dyke is dozens of kilometers long. Together with the auxiliary dykes, flood discharge channels, navigation, etc., the entire project can be said to be the largest flood control project since the founding of the Tang Dynasty.
In addition to flood control, it also has irrigation, navigation and other functions.
The Hongze Lake flood control and conservancy project has never stopped since then, so the scale of the project will increase with time.
This is also the reason why after the Tang Empire unified China, there was only one flood in the Huaihe River area in the early years, and no large-scale floods occurred in subsequent years.
According to the Ministry of Industry, the current Huaihe River flood control project is enough to withstand a flood that occurs once in 50 years, and is currently moving towards the goal of resisting a flood that occurs once in a century.
Even if we encounter a once-in-a-hundred-year flood, we can actively discharge the flood through the flood discharge area that has been planned and prepared, proactively control the damage of the flood, and reduce the loss to an acceptable level.
At the same time, the Yellow River diversion project hosted by the Ministry of Industry has not stopped, and surveys and various preparations have been carried out.
When the time is right, the Tang Empire will artificially divert the Yellow River and completely tame the beast, so that people in the vast Huaihe River Basin and Shandong, Hebei and other regions no longer have to worry about the Yellow River flooding every year.
More importantly, the Ministry of Industry has already made plans to build a large-scale dam in selected areas of the Yangtze River and Yellow River for protection, irrigation, and navigation.
As for power generation, well, Datang is not that advanced these days, and there is no need for such a huge hydroelectric power station yet.
From these infrastructure projects, we can see that the policy consistency of the Tang Empire was very strong.
This also led to the Tang Empire building a large number of various infrastructures in various parts of the country, especially various water conservancy projects for flood control and drought relief. In addition to the Hongze Lake project directly allocated from the capital, in fact, more of them were various local Chinese projects.
Small projects.
Otherwise, why have there been no large-scale natural or man-made disasters in the Tang Empire in the past twenty years or so? Even if there is a temporary drought in some places, it will not cause thousands of miles of desolation, and there will be occasional flooding in some places.
It is because of the numerous flood control and drought relief water conservancy facilities built by the Tang Empire.
According to the current scale of the Tang Empire's water conservancy infrastructure, unless there is a long-term absence of rainfall over a large area or a continuous once-in-a-hundred-year flood, otherwise it will be all rubbish...
Even if you encounter it, it doesn’t matter...
Even if the local food production suddenly plummets, the Tang Empire will still have enough confidence to maintain food and clothing for the whole people!
After all, the entire earth can be said to be the granary of the Tang Dynasty.
For example, the Tang Empire spent a lot of effort and even carried out relocation operations to completely occupy the Nanyang region.
The huge Nanyang region can only be regarded as preliminary development at best. It is mainly concentrated in coastal areas such as Annan and Siam. It has immigrated to a few million people. However, with its superior climate conditions, its
Grain production is no worse than that of Hubei, which has a population of over 10 million.
It is estimated that within a few years, the grain output of the Nanyang region will surpass that of the Huguang region.
The Huguang area is currently the largest granary of the Tang Empire.
Overseas regions such as India and the Americas, especially North America, are now developing mechanized agriculture, and food production will skyrocket in the future.
Of course, the Tang Empire built granaries all over the world, not to prepare for local large-scale droughts, floods, etc.
The purpose of Datang's increase in grain production was to make the people rich and to lower the grain index.
This is also for the sake of global economic integration.
As for preparing for a large-scale reduction in local grain production, that is only incidental.
After all, the various water conservancy facilities in the Tang Empire were already very complete, and the empire continued to invest in construction. Ordinary natural disasters could not harm the survival of the Tang Empire.
However, the Tang Empire was still pursuing various infrastructure constructions and trying to continuously increase food production!
After all, no amount of food is too much.
It's just that with the current grain planting technology, it is difficult to increase the yield per acre, and the only way is to simply develop more cultivated land.
The cultivated land area is also limited, so Li Xuan pays more attention to increasing grain production.
In the 41st year of Xuanping, the Tang Dynasty was founded for decades, and after allocating countless research and development funds, it finally made a historic breakthrough in increasing grain production!
Professors from the Department of Chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology have successfully made nitrogen fertilizer from ammonia, a by-product of the coking industry.
The important thing to note is that it was not about inventing nitrogen fertilizer, but finding ways to use the by-products of the coking industry to make nitrogen fertilizer.
Because of chemical fertilizers, the Tang Empire began to use them on a small scale many years ago. However, the reason why it is said to be used on a small scale rather than on a large scale is because the cost of chemical fertilizers is relatively high.
For example, for phosphate fertilizer, the Imperial Institute of Technology of the Tang Dynasty has long ago discovered the use of sulfuric acid to directly treat phosphate rock. However, this method is relatively expensive and the output is not large. It is okay for small-scale use, but for a population of several hundred million, it is difficult to have
For the Tang Empire, which had countless cultivated lands, it was basically useless.
Potash fertilizers, synthetic urea, and even ammonia fertilizers have actually been invented a long time ago.
Those guys from the Chemistry Department of the Royal Institute of Technology have even developed compound fertilizers!
But of course there is no egg!
Just because it is invented and can be prepared in a laboratory does not mean it can be mass-produced.
Even if it can be mass-produced, it does not mean that the cost is low enough to be used on a large scale.
In recent years, the fertilizer industry of the Tang Empire has been in this embarrassing state.
Various synthetic fertilizers are actually available on the market and are produced in factories. However, they have problems such as high prices, low output, and difficulty in large-scale popularization.
This also led to the fact that the current chemical fertilizers in the Tang Empire were mainly nitrogen fertilizers produced from natural sodium nitrate ores.
In other words, it mainly comes from the sodium nitrate mine in the Principality of Chile!
This is the only large-scale sodium nitrate mine in the world, and there is no other semicolon. This directly led to the Principality of Chile, a vassal state directly belonging to the Tang Empire, to become extremely rich relying only on such a mine.
The Grand Duchess Elizabeth of the Principality of Chile, with her dowry from the Principality of Chile, became the woman with the most private wealth in the harem of the Tang Dynasty. It is said that her net worth is at least several million Tang Yuan...
There is no way, the private money of this person is an entire vassal state, and this vassal state is also very rich in resources.
However, even with such a large saltpeter mine, it was still not enough for the huge Tang Empire.
And distance is always a problem, and transportation back is troublesome and expensive.
Within the Tang Empire, they had been trying to synthesize chemical fertilizers in a cheaper way, especially nitrogen fertilizers.
Now, I finally found a solution.
The cost of preparing nitrogen fertilizer directly from the by-products of the coking industry is not high and the yield is acceptable.
When Li Xuan learned about this, he immediately issued a decree to ask the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises to immediately prepare a number of ammonia fertilizer factories to guide the production of ammonia fertilizer.
After all, this production method can directly extract nitrogen fertilizer from the by-products of coking. The coking industry of the Tang Empire was very developed, and there was a lot of ammonia as a by-product of the coking industry.
The steel industry of the Tang Empire consumed at least tens of millions of tons of coke every year.
The steel industry has always been a large consumer of coal. A lot of the coal produced in the Tang Empire was actually used for iron and steelmaking.
The coking industry consumes a huge amount of coal every year. In addition to the main product of coke, it can also obtain by-products such as gas, ammonia, benzene, coal tar, etc.
These are important raw materials for the chemical industry, and they are also the largest industry that promoted the progress of the chemical industry in the Tang Empire. Even the petrochemical industry that has emerged now has not been able to shake the status of the coking industry in the chemical industry for the time being.
Therefore, in a short period of time, it can effectively solve the problem of the source of fertilizer raw materials, not only reduce costs, but also allow the coking industry to obtain more additional benefits.
This was a good thing that could achieve multiple goals with one stone. Naturally, Li Xuan would not delay and immediately ordered him to prepare for the ammonia fertilizer factory.
Strive to allow farmers to use affordable nitrogen fertilizer as soon as possible.
Of course, I can only say it is affordable, but I dare not say it is cheap!
Because even if the nitrogen fertilizer produced in this way is affordable, it is definitely not cheap.
Moreover, the output may seem large, but for a global empire with hundreds of millions of people and countless arable lands around the world, this output is actually not enough.
But take things step by step and let the Royal Institute of Technology continue their research. They will always be able to find cheaper ways to produce fertilizers on a large scale.
The officials at the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises were all highly politically aware, and they took action as soon as Li Xuan gave the order.
The funds were directly in place. At the same time, talents were transferred from some chemical and machinery companies under the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises to form Anmin Fertilizer Company. Under the guidance of professors from the Royal Institute of Technology, plans for industrial mass production were completed in a short period of time.
came out.
Then we need to find several major domestic machinery companies to customize production equipment. As for factories and skilled workers, it is even easier. There are a lot of factories and technicians are directly transferred from other related companies.
According to estimates from the Ministry of State-owned Enterprises, small-scale trial production can be carried out within three months and mass production can be carried out within half a year.
Once Anmin Fertilizer Company's fertilizers are put on the market in half a year, it will mean that the Tang Empire finally has a fertilizer that can be artificially synthesized on a large scale, at an acceptable cost, and can be used on a large scale!
The strategic significance of this to the Tang Empire will be huge!
Because the large-scale application of chemical fertilizers was the only hope for the Tang Empire to achieve universal prosperity!