The wage situation needs to be rectified sooner rather than later

[wabatt]

Wish low wages would increase attraction to Trade Union IG, and trade union clout would increase wages.

Even better if it was calculated on the state level. Give the player an interesting decision to make if they want to build in state with strong trade unions or not.

 

[RickInVA]

what's the thought behind buildings not allowing pops to radicalize? isn't that what the police and national guard are for?

This! In this era Capitalists were mostly uncaring of labor. You won't work for 10 cents a day? Someone else will! Depending on the impact on the AI (playbalance) I would think the only reason Capitalists would raise wages would be an inability to get workers. Unless there is a option for a Henry Ford now and then that upsets the whole apple cart.

Also, governments were more likely to be strike breakers than supporters. Minimum wage laws were needed, because employers were abusing their power. There should be a reason for laws like Minimum Wage, specifically to raise SoL for Pops and thereby lowering radicalism.

 

[toxicgrunt]

This! In this era Capitalists were mostly uncaring of labor.

I’d think at least some ownership production methods would have wages based on radicalization (chiefly bureaucrats). The later ownership PMs could wage abuse more (LF/capitalists), then later later PMs (The worker owned ones) do radicalization again, or even more, which would likely also be further increased with worker protection of course.
idk how feasible it is to change wage on ownership PM atm though

 

[Fallofthepurple]

There are changes to this coming in 1.1 - buildings will only raise wages to prevent major worker radicalization or when trying to compete for labor rather than just going 'we made a bigger profit, everyone gets a raise!'

Didnt expect that this change would come so early but we love to see it!

 

[Wizzington]

what's the thought behind buildings not allowing pops to radicalize? isn't that what the police and national guard are for?

In short, we need some way of modelling that as the economy grows wages do also rise and short of a complex labor negotiation and wage pressures system (which would be cool but far beyond the scope for a post-release patch) I think this is the best way to go about it - a building will still allow workers to radicalize if they don't think they have good enough profit margins to raise wages, mind (or if they just don't care because the workers are discriminated colonial subjects).

 

[Baalzamon85]

Yea until we get the Unions DLC i think this is the best compromise for vanilla.

 

[PedroLuiz]

(or if they just don't care because the workers are discriminated colonial subjects).

does that include the Poles in a German Ethnostate?

 

[mikhail321]

I have an easier solution - just reduce qualifications growth by a factor of ten, so they finally start to matter and you have qualified labor shortages. Then the competition for labor will do the trick

 

[MylesSCP]

So I changed BUILDING_PROFIT_TARGET_TO_RAISE_WAGES from 0.2 to 0.99 to test what affect is has. After running an observe game on France using the AI mod it has taken 15 years for the French SoL to start rising. High SoLs are pretty well coordinated with states with a lower amount of peasants, but it's highly dependant on the industries in the state because highly productive industies tend to have slightly high wages even after the change and the wealthy owners bring up the SoL on average.

Industries are staying more profitable though with max wages tending to be roughly the same across a state. Overall I'm pretty satisfied.

 

[Dman1791]

This is probably the main culprit of resource industries being unreasonably uplifting for SoL. Typically my most affluent states are the colonies in Africa, thanks to the rubber plantations, coal mines, etc. It's often to the point that resource industry laborers are living better than a good chunk of the (supposed) middle class.

 

[Sbrubbles]

This is probably the main culprit of resource industries being unreasonably uplifting for SoL. Typically my most affluent states are the colonies in Africa, thanks to the rubber plantations, coal mines, etc. It's often to the point that resource industry laborers are living better than a good chunk of the (supposed) middle class.

To be fair though, with low wages in the colonies what you're gonna see are abnormally wealthy local african capitalists (though at least you'll take half their profits with LF)

 

[MylesSCP]

So I changed BUILDING_PROFIT_TARGET_TO_RAISE_WAGES from 0.2 to 0.99 to test what affect is has. After running an observe game on France using the AI mod it has taken 15 years for the French SoL to start rising. High SoLs are pretty well coordinated with states with a lower amount of peasants, but it's highly dependant on the industries in the state because highly productive industies tend to have slightly high wages even after the change and the wealthy owners bring up the SoL on average.

Industries are staying more profitable though with max wages tending to be roughly the same across a state. Overall I'm pretty satisfied.

A follow up on this: I noticed farms tend to have a lower wage even with similar profitability to urban industries like tools. I think it might have to do with BUILDING_INIT_PROFIT_TARGET_MAX = 0.20. My reasoning is that more industrial buildings like tools have a higher initial profitability compared to farms so they unnecessarily start with a higher wage. I'm going to try changing that to 0.99 and see what happens too.

 

[PedroLuiz]

A follow up on this: I noticed farms tend to have a lower wage even with similar profitability to urban industries like tools. I think it might have to do with BUILDING_INIT_PROFIT_TARGET_MAX = 0.20. My reasoning is that more industrial buildings like tools have a higher initial profitability compared to farms so they unnecessarily start with a higher wage. I'm going to try changing that to 0.99 and see what happens too.

isn't this due to job composition? have you checked for that?

 

[MylesSCP]

isn't this due to job composition? have you checked for that?

Only Paris is running out of peasants, so the other states shouldn't have to be increasing wages that much to compete for labor.

 

[PedroLuiz]

Only Paris is running out of peasants, so the other states shouldn't have to be increasing wages that much to compete for labor.

did you account for different ratios of Professions in the buildings? aka is the base wage higher or is it really the same

 

[MylesSCP]

did you account for different ratios of Professions in the buildings? aka is the base wage higher or is it really the same

That's a good point that I had not considered. I'll look into it.

 

[BPZ1941]

In short, we need some way of modelling that as the economy grows wages do also rise and short of a complex labor negotiation and wage pressures system (which would be cool but far beyond the scope for a post-release patch) I think this is the best way to go about it - a building will still allow workers to radicalize if they don't think they have good enough profit margins to raise wages, mind (or if they just don't care because the workers are discriminated colonial subjects).

Could you include a Defines-file term that allows us modders to at least test out a scenario where buildings actively seek to cut wages regardless of profitability?

 

[PedroLuiz]

To be fair though, with low wages in the colonies what you're gonna see are abnormally wealthy local african capitalists (though at least you'll take half their profits with LF)

i feel like buildings should really dislike having unaccepted cultures in higher strata positions

 

[brainiac1530]

This is probably the main culprit of resource industries being unreasonably uplifting for SoL. Typically my most affluent states are the colonies in Africa, thanks to the rubber plantations, coal mines, etc. It's often to the point that resource industry laborers are living better than a good chunk of the (supposed) middle class.

Yeah, I'm going there. My highest SoL state early into most USA games is Virginia -- somewhere around 20! Most of the state population consists of slaves. Due to slaves not requiring a wage, the plantations pay high wages to the rest. The slaves do okay because their goods are purchased on their behalf. The real driver, though, is that half of slaves work instead of the one-quarter of most pops. Thus, there's just far more overall productivity in the state than you'd expect for the population.

I think I'll refrain from trying to draw any explicit conclusions from this.

 

[Hethran]

Interesting. I wonder if this can be corrected by mods. Seems like it would make the economic game much harder - which would be good, in my opinion.

Yes

Just go into steamapps\Victoria 3\game\common\defines\00_defines.txt

BUILDING_PROFIT_TARGET_TO_RAISE_WAGES is the value that controls this - if the profit margin is above this number, the building AI will always slowly start raising wages.

Increase the value to whatever you want. If you want them to never automatically increase wages based on profits, just make it an absurdly large number.

By default it is .2, so they will always raise wages if profits are above 20%, I think is how it works right now

(disclaimer: Not entirely sure what effects this has on game balance in the long term, the fix the devs mentioned above will probably a better fix overall)