Employment problems

Hello all. I played this game back in 2002 with some high school friends extremely casually. At that time the extent of my play was something like "hey i can build roads and schools." Something made me think back to it a few weeks ago and I decided to give it another go, and I must say I've had some much better results.

That being said, my problem is today when I logged in I noticed a different style of welcome message than the usual tips. I've got a worker shortage problem. Ok, no big deal. I've had shortages before and corrected. But here's the thing. I have enough unemployed workers for a lot of these positions. And its not limited to one country. My whole empire seems to be experiencing this artificial worker shortage problem.

Assumption 1: positions aren't filled because a lack of 1 high tech engineer makes it impossible to allocate 30 subordinate jobs to that employee.

I don't have any idea if this is true but since my main country has 40,000 high tech engineers currently unemployed with a monthly graduating class of 7,500 its obviously not a sufficient explanation. (53,402 needed for 100%)

Assumption 2: People have quit working because they're not making enough money.

Since my employment has been moving steadily in the direction of new corporations I haven't questioned my salaries beyond that of some video I watched suggesting 300 index. Again, I have no idea if this is true because I haven't found anything that really explains worker needs or why a corporation would have a job and not hire unemployed workers.

For the record, all of my corporations are at a salary 300. 12 (of 43) have hiring under 100% (yesterday it was like 2) I have enough workers to fill all positions except high tech engineers but I have needs for every employee type except teachers and hospital staff.

From July to August 4580 in KB (by the way I'm playing on Kebir Blue, have I mentioned that?) I gained roughly 1,015,000 jobless people. yea that's right, as in straight line north. Now about 400,000 of that has corrected in the subsequent 2 months but upon investigating I see that this happened in Feb-March as well, 480,000- 1.5m jobless people. It corrected to 735k (pretty serious net loss) before this July-August action.

One other interesting note: both march and august show employment index growth at the same time the jobless were skyrocketing. In other words, whatever crisis I'm having created jobless people 1 month before it was reflected in employment which was growing to almost 91% March and 90.5% August....and now is just plummeting.

Anyone who could shed any light on this would be greatly appreciated.

As a side note, I have been using investment funds pretty extensively for the sake of my enterprise and my payout isn't happening at the moment but since it's not really explained as to how that impacts anything I don't know if that's causing any kind of problem.

Oh, and

Jabair88,

Please post the name of your country and the world on which it is based. So that players can look at what is going on.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

Baironia on Kebir Blue

You can check the availability of workers, or shortages on the education priorities page.

You can set the education priorities to make sure you have all the professionals you need.

It is a process you need to master and you can resolve the problems.

You should also make sure you do not require more workers than your population can provide. Too many corporations will cause a problem.

This too is visible on the education priority page.

You can see how many workers are available and how many are needed.

I think I’d have preferred if you didn’t respond at all? Like you read my message where I explain how many unemployed workers I have and how many I need for 100% production and the response is check the education tab to “make sure you have all the professionals you need�.

Really I just wanted to know why my corporations were firing people and then complaining of a worker shortage. Or, more importantly, why, after paying for the ability to build mining corps and building oil, possibly the most in demand resource, they would lose so much money that after filling their coffers they still close down. 1 made it and is profitable....can you only have one company per mining resource? Cuz that doesn’t seem right. Why can I only get to 90% employment before companies start having employment problems. I have a positive population growth and I’m usually getting 200k people a day on top. Is there some kind of hidden rule like hey you have to ignore at least half a million lowlifes that just aren’t going to go to their job? Because that could very well be realistic but without knowing that I can’t make sound decisions.

I should state, my goal here with simcountry is to create as much of a self sustaining economic empire as possible so I’m trying to diversify, sign contracts, create expectations of secured products. But it seems as if the game is saying, don’t bother with any of that nonsense, just build defense fortifications for the rest of your sim life because they’re profitable and have the added benefit of always having higher demand the more you build. That isn’t fun, it’s boring. Just my opinion.

And I thank the bot in advance for his impending reply that I should check the education page and not build too many corporations.

Jabair88,

The game is programmed to keep a minimum number of unemployed Low Level Workers, (so that the worker promotion system, that creates Medium/High Level Workers, by promoting surplus Low Level workers), can function properly.

If your number of unemployed Low Level Workers drops too low, the game demotes other professionals to Low Level Workers. This can cause shortages of educated workers, often in the High Tech category. Which then causes Corporations to reduce hiring due a lack of High Tech professionals.

The requirement for unemployed Low Level Workers doesn't scale properly with total population. As such, a country with 100M people has a similar minimum, to a nation with 20M people. As your population grows, the few hundred thousand unemployed Low Level Workers will be less significant, and will be more in line with normal, real world base unemployment rates.

As a player, the way to manage this, is to make sure not to build too many Corporations. So that your number of unemployed Low Level Workers doesn't drop too low, triggering a mass demotion of professionals.

I agree that this could be better explained to players, and better balanced, so as not to trigger shortages of educated workers.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

Dan that was extremely helpful. I did not know about automatic demotion, although it explains why i had worker conversions even in months where i didn't do it manually. I'm only just now approaching 21M population. Still can't help but feel like these bums need to get to work though, just sitting around wasting their lives. Having a half million unemployed when you only have 9 million workers makes me feel like I'm not doing my job.

Jabair88,

You're welcome, I'm always happy to help other players understand the game.

Yeah, it feels a little weird when you have a low population, but your population will grow with time. In a country of 100M population, 500,000 workers is only about 1% of the workforce. Once your population has reached the stabilization level (currently approximately 100M people, give or take), you should be able to maintain a total unemployment rate of 5%, even without much micromanagement. It's just a matter of riding through the somewhat unbalanced low population stage, where the minimum unemployment levels, don't really match the size of your country.

Signed President of DanNation on LU