Chapter 754: Losing Face While Dividing Money (3)_1
To earn more silver, each household sent two laborers to work. Some strong villagers specifically chose the hardest and most exhausting tasks so that they could earn more labor shares.
However, the peasants didn’t fear hardship or fatigue and all hoped to earn more labor shares. Once a few individuals took on the tasks that came with more labor shares, others felt discontent. Later, Tang Xin thought of a method: she selected those willing and able to do the arduous work and let them take turns.
This method gained unanimous approval, and it was eventually adopted to arrange tasks, resolving the minor frictions among the villagers.
Since the Mo Family had contributed thirty acres of land and had also paid the most silver for greenhouse materials, and with Tang Xin overseeing the greenhouse vegetables, the Mo Family didn’t contribute laborers. Their labor shares were calculated as two laborers, based on the average of everyone’s labor shares.
The Mo Family wasn’t lacking one or two hundred taels of silver, and although growing greenhouse vegetables was aimed at accumulating merit, they were not so generous as to refuse their share. Mo Yan originally thought of calculating it as one person’s labor share, but the other thirty-five households felt uncomfortable, believing they were taking advantage of the Mo Family. They insisted on counting two laborers for the Mo Family, and at the highest rate at that. Mo Yan didn’t agree but ultimately accepted the average labor shares.
Tang Xin’s accounting was well done, recording clearly what everyone did each day, how many labor shares they earned, and the final totals. It was even easier to record daily revenues and expenditures in the ledger, with no errors occurring.
Mo Yan reviewed each household’s total labor shares to calculate the silver they would receive and found only two mistakes. Nodding her head, she praised Tang Xin, "The accounting is very good. After correcting these two errors, we’ll send it to the village chief to have a look. If the village chief has no objections, we’ll let the villagers come to our house to divide the silver."