Economy not crashing, but worse

I once had a population of around 55 million, it is now down to 29 million and dropping fast around 35,000 a month

I used to have a high tech economy lots and lots of high tech engineers and seniors etc. Now I am sitting at around 57% unemployment (though that number is slightly going down now)

My nation is Mistral on White Giant

I am now a free player was once a sub (didn't sub after the whole wind farm situation we won't get into that)

This is not my first nation, I lost a few nations in war in fearless blue and now I just casually check simcountry instead.

My corporations are stuck at around 5% hiring... do I have to start closing them all at this point and start from scratch? Maybe invade a c3 and drain more pops in fields I require (I have no military)

I am just shocked that employment crashed that rapidly, my education index is fantastic I have plently of highschools and universities.

I lowered government salaries trying to make corporate jobs more approachable, I even cash injected a few of the corporations to make sure they can hire at higher salaries, I thought about corporate upgrades but not of the corporations make sense right now to do so.

My economy is energy based right name *drum roll* windfarms and turbines (wow so shocking)

Is there a way out of this whole?

*edit* forgot to mention it isn't really a lack of workers situation it is that somehow the workforce I once had all became low level workers who refuse to go back to being hightech engineers or anything else, and then tons of high tech engineers etc that refuse to actually get hired.

Looks like you got under control.

Free players are not allowed to have high populations, so that might be the reason for the decline.

Worth mentioning that a few months back, it seems the GM tweaked the level of health needed.

The problem could be either of those points. But, I suspect you should boost your health index, till a little and try to get your life expectancy to about 70.

Climbing out of the hole, it does seem the game is set to making it so once you are not subbed your pop is supposed to be around 30,000,000.

The Migration thing, and the random dramatic spike of in death expectancy therefore makes sense.

My corps are waking up and hiring again, which is good

Again my nation is Mistral on White Giant

I am sitting on around 2 billion (million) khs of energy right now that I am debating on selling but I think everyone will get mad cause when people were doing that a few months back the energy market tanked, but it will be nice to have a good 200 trillion to build an army with.

I think that would be the next step is to invade a c3 and pop slurp the missing pieces of population I need in order to regain 100% production in my industry after the purging the game has done.

Any thoughts?

Also no one really should be looking for a "meta" however wind farms were the "meta" I once had alot of them then culled them. Should I move away from them or does it still hit financial index the way it did before?

I never understood the wind finance thing. There is a selling limit, so you might as well start dumping power