Chapter 169 Savior Mu Xin

With the start of the theme park, the level of activity in Oxford Town had undergone a new change.

If Oxford Town half a year ago was a stagnant pool of water, then the current Oxford Town was a pot of boiling oil.

The main street had been widened by double, and the newly laid asphalt surface was shiny black.

The sidewalks on both sides were paved with red bricks and fitted with brand-new LED streetlights and benches. Each bench had a line of small text engraved on it: Oxford Town Public Utilities Company.

There were at least three times as many pedestrians on the street as there were half a year ago, and they were no longer exclusively college students.

Mu Xin withdrew his gaze from the street and glanced at his system panel.

[ Oxford Town Current Population: 30,247 ]

[ USD Distributed Today: 30,247,000 ]

The population had broken the thirty thousand mark.

Mu Xin also had Victoria announce a policy: workers who stayed on the construction site to continue working during Thanksgiving and Christmas would be paid double their usual wages.

They would receive an additional daily cold weather allowance of one hundred dollars, and all transportation and accommodation expenses for family members visiting them in Oxford Town would be fully reimbursed.

Mu Xin was confident that he could keep these people in Oxford Town by the end of the year.

"Mr. Mu, this is the statistic for the new employees who joined last week," Jessica said as she entered and placed a bound document on the desk.

"Three hundred and forty-seven people were hired last week, one hundred and twenty of whom are construction workers. Most of them drove here themselves after hearing about our benefits from Indiana and Michigan."

"Eighty-three are new members of the theme park design team, and Mark Woodbury also brought two more people over from Disney."

"Forty-two are preparatory staff for the Medical Center, and the rest are distributed among the power company, the Water Plant, and the security company."

"What about the turnover rate?" Mu Xin asked.

"Zero. No one resigned voluntarily last week. You have already become the savior of these people."

Mu Xin picked up the document and flipped through a few pages. It contained not only statistical counts but also the previous work experience and reasons for changing jobs of the new employees.

He flipped to the very first page, where Jessica had circled several cases with a red pen.

The first one was a Black electrician named Marcus Reed, thirty-seven years old, who had previously worked at a construction company in Indianapolis for eight years.

His former boss owed him three months of wages, totaling over twenty thousand dollars. He had gone to ask for it three times, and each time he was kicked out by security.

The last time, he stood at the company entrance holding a sign that said this company owed workers' wages and refused to pay. As a result, he was taken away by the police on charges of illegal protest.

He spent one night in the detention center, and after getting out, he saw the recruitment information for Oxford Town online. He took a Greyhound bus and arrived the next day.

In his first week of employment, he posted a message on the employee forum: "I have worked here for a month, and my wages arrived on time, not a penny less. I worked for my previous boss for eight years and never experienced such a thing. Thank you all. I don't know what to say, just thank you."

The second was a Mexican-American single mother named Sophia Garcia, who previously worked as a housekeeper at a hotel in Cincinnati, earning twelve dollars an hour with no insurance.

Her son had severe asthma, and the out-of-pocket portion of his monthly medication costs was over four hundred dollars, which was an almost unaffordable sum for her.

But she had no choice, because changing jobs meant a gap in insurance, and she would have to pay for her son's medication entirely on her own.

She had worked at that hotel in Cincinnati for six years and had never received a single pay raise.

Until she saw a report on the Oxford Town hotel project and saw that all permanent employees had top-tier Blue Cross Blue Shield medical insurance, covering themselves and their immediate family members.

She called to ask if it was true, and after receiving a confirmation, she quit her job and moved over the next day.

The third was a second-generation Chinese-American civil engineer named Tommy Chen, a graduate of UC Berkeley, who had previously worked at a large engineering consulting firm in San Francisco for four years.

His reason for resigning was simple: he couldn't stand the housing prices in Silicon Valley.

Here at Mu Xin's, he received a contract with an annual salary of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus a full benefits package and moved into a newly built employee apartment in Oxford Town, a one-bedroom, two-living-room unit with a parking space, for a monthly rent of six hundred dollars.

He used to think the American Dream was dead, only to discover that it had just moved to Oxford Town, Ohio.

Mu Xin stopped when he flipped to the back. This page was a report from the tax optimization team, which he hadn't looked at closely before.

The content surprised him a little. Victoria's special tax team, consisting of six certified public accountants and two former IRS tax dispute attorneys, had created a personalized tax optimization plan for every new employee.

The method wasn't complicated, but it required professionals to execute it.

First, it involved utilizing various legal tax exemption policies in Ohio—in plain terms, making reasonable use of the tax law itself—such as state-level housing subsidy tax exemptions, family dependent deductions, education expense deductions, and so on.

Then, it involved providing various tax-free benefits in the company's name, such as transportation subsidies, meal subsidies, children's education funds, and reimbursement for training expenses.

These items were not legally considered taxable income for employees, but in real life, they were solid purchasing power.

The result was that a construction worker with an annual income of eighty thousand dollars, through this tax optimization plan, saw their effective tax rate drop from over twenty percent to less than twelve percent.

A project manager with an annual income of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, through legal tax deferrals and benefit deductions, saw their effective tax rate drop from twenty-eight percent to eighteen percent.

In the United States, tax avoidance is a privilege exclusive to the wealthy.

The wealthy can afford the most expensive accountants and the most expensive tax attorneys; they can get their effective tax rates lower than those of the middle class. This is legal tax planning.

It's just that the cost of such planning is too high; a top tax attorney charges over a thousand dollars an hour, which ordinary workers could never afford.

But Mu Xin paid this cost for them; he used the company structure to distribute this privilege to every single employee.

It wasn't because he wanted to do charity; it was because he was calculating a bigger picture.

If a worker could save several hundred to a thousand dollars more each month, they wouldn't leave; if they didn't leave, their families wouldn't leave.

If their families didn't leave, their children would attend school in Oxford Town, grow up, make friends, and treat this place as their home.

As long as people didn't leave, Mu Xin wouldn't have to spend money on recruitment, training, or the time loss of adaptation periods to bring in new people.

When all was said and done, the salaries and operating costs spent on the tax team ultimately bought a highly stable labor base.

Jessica stood up from the sofa, walked to the desk, and placed another document down. "You might want to see this as well."

Mu Xin picked it up and opened it; it was an employee satisfaction survey.

Overall satisfaction: 9.4 points (out of 10).

Top three most satisfying aspects: Timeliness of salary payment (9.8 points), welfare benefits (9.6 points), and workplace safety (9.5 points).

Below that was the least satisfying aspect.