Chapter 319: Using the Code in a Chaotic World

  Chapter 309 – The World in Turmoil Uses Heavy Codes

The New Holy Roman Empire was a large cotton importing and consuming country, importing five to six million goddams of cotton from the outside world every year.

Even so, still not able to meet the needs of domestic industry and commerce, Austria is also a cotton importing country.

Of course, this has to do with the economic development policy pursued by the Vienna government, the cotton industry was not included in the key development projects.

In order to maintain the status of Europe’s top food exporter, the government does not advocate the cultivation of cotton in the local area, the lack of raw materials has become an important factor restricting the development of Austria’s cotton industry.

Against this background, the promotion of cotton cultivation in the colonies could not only save a lot of foreign exchange, but also pull in domestic textile capitalists.

For example: Bavaria is the traditional center of cotton spinning industry in Germany, many capitalists because of the lack of raw materials, have gone to West Africa to open their own plantations.

This political and economic account, everyone will still calculate.

Prime Minister Felix counted once and said: “Your Majesty, the biggest problem of planting cotton is that a large amount of labor force is needed for harvesting. The colonies are different from the country, so it is too difficult to hire a large number of people for a short period of time.

Unless we learn from the Americans and train a group of cheap black slave labor, we won’t be able to solve this problem.

But using a large number of indigenous laborers goes against our long-term strategy and is not conducive to long-term stability.”

This is one of the most realistic problems, otherwise Franz would not have run away to plant rubber trees. Now the royal plantation, the cotton plantation area can not go up, the main reason is the labor shortage.

In fact, the rubber plantation also needs a large number of laborers, but the rubber tree is not grown in a day, and the demand for laborers before the rubber harvest is much smaller.

The present number of immigrants is still limited, and it is not possible for all these people to run away to plant cotton, nor are all regions suitable for cotton cultivation.

In addition to cotton, cash crops such as coffee, palm, cocoa, rubber, tobacco, soybeans, and peanuts are equally important for development.

Wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes are agricultural products that are not a priority for development, but self-sufficiency still needs to be achieved. The budget-conscious plantation owners can’t afford to shell out money to go out and buy them.

These industries require labor, and the colonies are sparsely populated. The lack of labor is not a half a star, Franz has no doubt that even if the immigrants ten million, can be easily digested.

Franz said helplessly: ”The lack of labor force will have to rely on everyone to think of their own solutions. In addition to recruiting immigrants from within the country, you can also go overseas to recruit laborers.

All in all, there is only one principle, the foreign laborers must have their assimilation completed and meet all of our requirements before they can be naturalized.”

At this time, Franz suddenly wished that the Russians would abolish serfdom. Once the Czarist government emancipated the serfs, it wouldn’t be long before there would be a large number of bankrupt peasants.

Such bankrupt peasants who couldn’t read a whole lot of big words were quality immigrants. Those without cultural heritage are always the easiest to assimilate.

Unlike the present serfdom society, serfs are the property of the nobility, want to recruit labor in Tsarist Russia, pay for it!

The population trade that can not be carried out in the open, secretly this market still exists, but unfortunately the cost is too high.

Recruiting laborers from overseas is easy to say, but not easy to do. There were so many choices for immigrants on the European continent that everyone had their own circle.

In addition to the country, Austria only has a bit of a face in the German region and the Italian region, and is able to recruit immigrants. When it comes to the Western European region, basically no one buys it.

Only after being forced to do so did everyone look to the Far East. In any case, the labor force in these regions was better than the local natives.

Anyway, in this era, Europe’s per capita income is more than ten times that of Asia, and hiring laborers from East Asia, that’s also good value.

This is not without its pitfalls, at least in terms of ethnic integration, the difficulty increased several times, but of course this is better than not being able to integrate the local natives.

Colonial Minister Josip Jelacic warned, “Your Majesty, if a large number of overseas laborers are recruited, future law and order, labor conflicts, will all become serious social problems.”

He was not worried about the local immigrants being bullied, on the contrary, Josip Jelacic was worried about the local immigrants bullying the foreign laborers and triggering social conflicts.

Never test the colonizers’ modesty, except for Franz, who is a big family and loves to eat, many farmers, plantation owners and mine owners know nothing about what they are doing for profit.

In this regard, the old aristocrats did a little better, they recruited most of the laborers are the original serfs of their own families, belong to the root and branch, in order to the family’s reputation there is a restraint.

The outbreak of capital accumulation of the households is different, arrears, withholding wages, and even renege on the debt of the things that happen from time to time. This is true for their own people, not to mention foreign laborers.

Because of the haphazard behavior of these people, the workload of the colonial government increased tremendously. In the end, a system of registration of laborers’ employment had to be introduced.

The household registration system, which was not even implemented in the country, was instead implemented first in the colonies. If not for the technical problems, Franz was ready to issue identity cards.

Now that the colony had a small population, it was still possible to manage it this way. As the population continued to increase in the future, the difficulty of managing this would skyrocket.

After hesitating for a few moments, Franz said fiercely, “The chaotic world uses heavy punishment, the colonial government must establish social order and crack down on criminals.

Gang organizations, street punks, and hobos who have been hanging around for a long time, all of them should be thrown inside the mines for me.

For labor conflicts, just catch the typical ones and make an example of them. Catch a few with serious problems and deal with them seriously, then publicize them.”

Frankly speaking, this order of Franz was contrary to the law, but the colony was not the homeland, and the government of Vienna had never said that it would use the laws of the homeland.

The main thing that caused problems with social security was employment, and if everyone had a proper job, there would be less room for the mob to survive.

Franz’s order amounted to cutting off gang organizations at the source, and now that the rules had been changed, there was no need to wait until a crime had been committed before arrests could be made, as long as they were gangsters they were sent to the digs.

Even the punks who kept committing small crimes and big ones, the police didn’t need to look for evidence of the crime, they just threw them to the mines for labor rehabilitation.

The same goes for the unemployed, in the colonies where there is a serious lack of labor, they can’t even find a job, so why not just have the government arrange a job?

Don’t worry, Franz is temperate. There is no evidence of crime was sent into the situation and digging people, the government still want to pay wages at market price, there is no such thing as wrongful or not wrongful.

Criminals, potential criminals have gone digging, if social security can still deteriorate, then the colonial officials can go digging themselves.

Compared to social order, labor conflicts were actually minor problems. Market demand determines the relationship between labor and management.

When there is a serious shortage of labor, how dare you withhold wages and not be afraid that people will quit?

Franz didn’t think there would be many such fools. Those who did so in the past were a bunch of idiots who did not set their minds right and have now paid a heavy price for it.

The real trouble is when there is a surplus of labor and these people dare to run amok. The government wants to regulate them harshly, and it also has to consider the unemployment problem brought about.

(End of chapter)