Chapter 422: Chapter 411: Improving People’s Livelihood
Despite Perfikot not paying much attention to her luxurious lifestyle, the vast gap between her life and that of ordinary people still concerned her.
It was not only about whether her rule was stable but also whether her Northern Territory plan could be successfully implemented.
The hardship of the people’s lives meant that they needed to spend more energy and income on maintaining daily living expenses, reducing their energy and investment in construction, and lowering labor efficiency.
Ask yourself, is a person who has three meals a day and lives without worry, with ample income, more enthusiastic about work, or is it someone who only has two meals a day, is cold and hungry, and can’t support their family?
The answer is obviously self-evident. You can’t expect a horse to run without feeding it, and to make a horse run fast, it’s not just about feeding it grass, but rather feeding it fried soybeans and fine feeds, better than the human diet.
When it comes to workers, Perfikot needs to ensure that workers can eat well, dress warmly, and their income can support their family, with ideally some savings to improve their living standards—this is the most perfect situation.
It’s easy to understand keeping workers fed and warm; after all, in the extreme cold of the apocalypse, not being able to eat or wear properly could literally result in death.
To protect the precious population she struggled to save, Perfikot couldn’t let them be consumed by hunger and cold.
As for income... even though after the apocalypse she could adopt a rationing system and simply not pay workers any wages, rationing is still a form of labor remuneration; it’s just a change in the form of payment.
It’s like the voucher period she experienced in her childhood before traveling, where instead of using money, various vouchers were used, which were essentially a kind of typical equivalent, functioning as labor remuneration.
Therefore, money is not the key, but rather the remuneration obtained from labor that can support a family.
As for giving workers some savings to improve their lives, this is actually another management method to promote their work enthusiasm.
Because for lower-level workers, if their monthly reward from hard work is only enough to support their family and fill their stomachs, their lives will undoubtedly seem hopeless in terms of improvement.
This will cause lower-level workers to lose hope in life and be devoid of motivation to strive for a better life, and they will also become unmotivated in their work.
However, having the means to improve their lives means their lives can gradually get better, which motivates them to work harder for upward mobility, making life better for themselves and their families.
Meanwhile, this portion of consumption can also stimulate domestic demand, activate the market, promote various industries, and lead to an upward trend in the overall economy.
Therefore, Perfikot sometimes doesn’t understand those capitalists, why do they strive to exploit the labor and surplus value of workers to the maximum extent, while trying their best to exploit their labor remuneration?
If workers have no money, how can they buy the products they produce? Surely you can’t sell all the goods to the wealthy middle-class and upper-class nobles?
The truly profitable bosses would let workers produce the things they need and pay them a little more so that workers can afford the things they produce, thus creating a loop where the factory gets orders, workers earn income and improve their lives, which is a win-win situation.
Those factory owners and capitalists who would rather donate money to charity than give workers a raise can only be described as shortsighted in Perfikot’s eyes.
Of course, it could also be because they think the products they produce are not stuff their workers can afford, so they simply won’t give workers a raise to ensure maximum profit.
But to Perfikot, this seems like a foolish act because their workers’ resentment will grow.
While some may always think, "If you don’t work, there are Palus who will," Palus also choose their bosses and work environments, and going to a factory to tighten screws is never favored. If not forced by life, who would wish to do such tiring, laborious work?
At the very least, Perfikot herself does not wish to do such work; perhaps forced by life, she would choose such work temporarily, but once an opportunity for change arises, she would switch jobs immediately.
Workers do not switch jobs simply because the cost of changing jobs is too high, and they can’t afford it.
If workers truly feel that the losses of continuing with a job outweigh the cost of changing it, they often switch jobs without hesitation.
Perfikot herself thinks this way, so it’s easy to imagine what kind of thoughts lower-level workers have.
This also makes Perfikot think more about how to improve the lives of the lower classes and enhance their quality of life, thereby making the social structure of the Northern Territory more stable.
As she designs these, the first thing she thinks of is naturally the warm pitcher she thought of when she was studying public sentiment, which really counts as a necessity for ordinary people before the popularization of heating. It plays a significant role and has great utility for ordinary people.
Therefore, without hesitation, Perfikot quickly ordered the establishment of a new factory to produce both warm pitchers and another type of warmer that directly burns charcoal inside.
These two things are not complicated; as long as there are raw materials, simple mechanical processing will suffice, and even manual production can also knock them out.
Thus, not long after Perfikot’s order, affordable, simple, and easy-to-use warm pitchers and warmers appeared on the Chernobyl market, and once available, they received an enthusiastic response, with sales booming.
Even the Shelby family, supported by Perfikot, started smuggling these warm pitchers and warmers to other places, showing the popularity of these two products.
In fact, this is not surprising, as these items are indeed in genuine demand, and basic needs are often the most profitable business.
Perfikot did not put the money earned from warm pitchers and warmers into her own treasury but used it to improve the livelihoods of Chernobyl’s lower-class citizens.
For example, she invested in setting up community health centers, although there were only one or two newly graduated medical apprentices, they could still treat minor ailments for these lower-class citizens without significant expenses.
As for setting up elementary schools for education, it goes without saying—they are customary practices.
If Perfikot had any particularly innovative place, perhaps the clothing rental bureau would be a unique aspect.