She Only Cares About Cultivation
Chapter 81: 【081】90s cook 81

Chapter 81: 【081】90s cook 81

Actually, Gong Mingxia was somewhat presumptuous today. Originally, she thought she could help the other party because the printing products of the future generations were quite rich. She tried to give some advice, hoping it might solve the headache the other person was facing, but now the key issue was that it wasn’t a technical problem the person was facing, but rather the factory was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Why do I say that?

Take an example Tangyuan knew.

In the city where Tangyuan lived back then, there was a hospital director who was arrested, and his story was just like this.

If we say that factories might face sales channel issues, indirectly leading to poor turnover, or other technical reasons causing problems, then what about hospitals? Aren’t hospitals always in need of "customers"?

But this particular hospital couldn’t even pay its employees’ wages...

What was the reason?

It was because this director relentlessly mismanaged the hospital.

How did he mismanage the hospital?

His specific actions included spending recklessly on new equipment and instruments regardless of budget constraints and, despite not having enough patients, spending a fortune on expanding the hospital building...

All of this was done in hopes of driving the hospital into the bankruptcy trap, then through bribing officials of the state-owned assets supervision and administration commission, he managed to get a very low appraisal price for the hospital. He then partnered with others to buy the hospital, ultimately turning this impressive facility with numerous medical instruments into his private property...

See, these were her personal experiences. And because of this incident, she heard the grandparents and parents in her community also mention the wave of layoffs in the late ’90s, most of which happened just like this.

Take the steel mills, for example. Workers were laid off not because they lacked skills but because the factories closed down...

So why did the closures happen? It wasn’t until many years later that everyone found out that the closures were intentional by the factory leaders, who wanted to transform these factories into their businesses. So they would tire the factories desperately, indifferent to the lives of so many formal employees, forcibly making them buy out their years of service and then laying them off.

Of course, there was another way, which was to receive subsidies, though this was not referred to as laying off but "staying at home."

Staying at home meant earning a basic salary; this wasn’t too bad, actually, since you still had a basic salary and could earn more with your skills if you went outside.

Many say, doesn’t turning into private enterprise also require hiring people?

Yes, but do you know how to exploit workers?

Hire when there are orders, and fire workers directly when there are none, without any insurance benefits, and with extremely low wages. Moreover, after buying up state enterprises cheaply, many made money and then transferred their capital, or moved to the South or even emigrated abroad.

In other words, during the state enterprise phase, you had an iron rice bowl. But in the private enterprise phase, you could be laid off at any moment, with no security at all, and even after working, you wouldn’t necessarily get a salary.

So today, after that person finished speaking, Gong Mingxia fell silent because she knew she couldn’t help him. Even though she had many ideas in her mind that could help him, laying off involved many aspects, and as an outsider, and just a cook at that, if she really said something, would anyone believe it?

Thus, in the end, it just became a scene where she was overly talkative. However, today’s conversation also made her realize that more people would soon engage in small businesses like her. Maybe in the near future, competition in the boxed lunch business would intensify.

It seemed she had to plan ahead, just to avoid being caught off guard by sudden changes.