More Realistic Wages and Labor
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:21 am
I was thinking that wages and labor skill could be more interestingly and accurately portrayed. I think it'd create a lot more choices, and it'd be quite educational.
User-Adjustable Wage Levels for Firms
What if you were allowed to set wages for the workers in a business, from a minimum needed to simply attract any worker (which would adjust automatically as the labor situation in the city changes) up to higher amounts which would attract better skilled, experienced, or better educated workers. Higher skilled workers would raise the unit level (or something similar if the unit level as it is now was scrapped in favor of a new system).
You could also make it so that there are different types of labor skills. For example, people in retail won't be skilled in manufacturing. It can possibly be broken down even further to different unit types (manufacturing workers, inventory workers, retail sales workers), though that may be an unnecessary level of detail.
Businesses Compete for Workers Using Wages
Setting a higher wage would compete away skilled workers from other businesses. So having a high wage level in your stores would cause your competitors to lose their skilled workers.
People would naturally gain expertise while working the job. But people also age and retire, and are replaced with new entry level people. What this could mean in the game is that entry level workers end up working for the firms offering low wages, but they change jobs to the firms offering better pay as they become better skilled. After all, the better paying firms get to pick the best skilled applicants, since they offer better pay, while the low paying firms just have to take what they can get. This also means that a boom in an industry (like manufacturing) brings in many new low skilled workers and causes overall skill in that industry to be rather low until the workers gain experience. Similarly, if there's a decline in the industry (layoffs), there may be many high skilled workers available, even with lower wages offered, and unskilled workers won't be able to find jobs.
Expertise: Product-Specific > Class-Specific > Industry Specific
Now, rather than just assume all manufacturing workers can work equally well in any type of manufacturing plant, workers can be particularly skilled/experienced in working with a particular product, but those skills should also be transferable (but to a lesser extent) to the same product category (like a bed manufacturing worker will be pretty good at working with furniture in general), and their skills are least transferable to manufacturing in general. They'd still be better than an entry level person since they have general experience in manufacturing. They'll still want the best paying job they can get, though. So they will switch to a higher paying job if they can get it. So a firm offering high wages will seek out workers skilled in that particular product, but they'll take workers from other industries before they take an entry level worker, even if that experienced worker was working more efficiently in his previous job (but that had lower pay). This means you could have entire industries of more skilled workers, and entire industries that keep getting stuck with entry level workers as their experienced workers get poached away by higher paying industries.
This can mean that if a city has a lot of expertise in an area, a new firm could pop up and more easily attract skilled workers, sort of like Silicon Valley is a great place to find computer technology workers, and Detroit may have a lot of vehicle assembly line workers. If you went and opened a new factory of some type in a city with no businesses of that type, you'd be limited to a certain level of expertise since you would be the only one training workers in that industry (so you'd have to keep training newer workers rather than constantly poaching expert workers). And businesses in the city that offer high wages will still take your workers away, even if it's a different industry, unless they already have better option available.
I also think workers could naturally gain expertise in an occupation over time, but they could also have training to speed it up. That does raise interesting issues about training workers only to get poached by higher paying employers. But perhaps employee retention should be a valid concern, including the possibility of making an employee too valuable for your firm to keep.
Skill Affects Quality
Worker expertise already affects the quantity that workers can process. But perhaps it should also affect quality. An experienced toy doll maker might do a better job at stuff and stitching the doll. A car manufacturing line worker might do a better job at identifying and fixing imperfections. A livestock processor might be better at cutting the meat properly and making sure undesired pieces don't get through (cartilage or bone, etc.). Perhaps the effect of labor can vary by product, but perhaps it already does in the form of the dependence on raw material quality versus tech quality. High tech dependence usually means that the work is more automated, while higher raw material quality usually means the worker is more of a skilled crafter. Alternatively, products could have the quality breakdown be tech level, material quality, and worker expertise.
I think this can be important for determining wages, though, so that wages are higher in industries where worker expertise is more important (and where consumers care a lot about quality for that product).
Wage Level Changes, Unemployment, Population, Cost of living, Land Values
The minimum wage you need to offer (which is set automatically) will be dependent on unemployment and population growth and immigration/emigration. If there's insufficient housing, then population growth suffers, and the labor force can't grow. That can keep unemployment low, which can force higher wages as businesses compete for labor. Higher wages also attract more population. Lower wages hurts population growth, possible even causing emigration. But cost of living is a factor as well, so what is a good wage in city with a low cost of living might be a low wage in city with a high cost of living. Cost of living may also be influenced by land values and rents. There may also be issues with desirability of a city. People want attractions and services, low costs of living, and low unemployment. There's could be a lot more details to look at here.
Education
Education could play a role in the ability of workers to do jobs well. Certainly, R&D could be made to be heavily dependent on educated workers, and so it may be best to set up in high wage, developed cities even if the wages are higher. I'm not sure how education should affect other jobs. It could be a positive modifier that works in addition to expertise. Or labor can have specific educations, like in retail, manufacturing, farming, and so workers with the right educations will be more valuable, or it can be product class specific. That would also mean that there may be shortages of educated entry level workers, and that it may change over time as students seek educations in the areas that are booming. But maybe this is a bit redundant with expertise from experience and training. Another option I can think of is that there would be different jobs involved in a firm, and some of those benefit heavily from education, like management and specialists, as opposed to line workers.
It'd be nice to replicate some of the advantages high income cities (countries) have over low income cities (countries), which is in part education. Another thought might be that higher education could make it more feasible to develop and maintain complicated machinery to do tasks where wages are high, which can outweigh the savings from using more low wage workers in more manual labor.
If the game introduced services, they could also benefit from education more than manufacturing.
City Simulation
I think the ideas I've started to outline here could be useful for the type of stuff being looked at in the city simulation forum. For example, a mayor of the city could potentially have a lot of things to influence with these game mechanics. Education, housing, welfare, environmental regulation, healthcare, etc., which are things that in some way can affect the desirability of a city for business and the people, the quality of workers and average wages, etc.
Anyway, those are the initial thoughts I have.
User-Adjustable Wage Levels for Firms
What if you were allowed to set wages for the workers in a business, from a minimum needed to simply attract any worker (which would adjust automatically as the labor situation in the city changes) up to higher amounts which would attract better skilled, experienced, or better educated workers. Higher skilled workers would raise the unit level (or something similar if the unit level as it is now was scrapped in favor of a new system).
You could also make it so that there are different types of labor skills. For example, people in retail won't be skilled in manufacturing. It can possibly be broken down even further to different unit types (manufacturing workers, inventory workers, retail sales workers), though that may be an unnecessary level of detail.
Businesses Compete for Workers Using Wages
Setting a higher wage would compete away skilled workers from other businesses. So having a high wage level in your stores would cause your competitors to lose their skilled workers.
People would naturally gain expertise while working the job. But people also age and retire, and are replaced with new entry level people. What this could mean in the game is that entry level workers end up working for the firms offering low wages, but they change jobs to the firms offering better pay as they become better skilled. After all, the better paying firms get to pick the best skilled applicants, since they offer better pay, while the low paying firms just have to take what they can get. This also means that a boom in an industry (like manufacturing) brings in many new low skilled workers and causes overall skill in that industry to be rather low until the workers gain experience. Similarly, if there's a decline in the industry (layoffs), there may be many high skilled workers available, even with lower wages offered, and unskilled workers won't be able to find jobs.
Expertise: Product-Specific > Class-Specific > Industry Specific
Now, rather than just assume all manufacturing workers can work equally well in any type of manufacturing plant, workers can be particularly skilled/experienced in working with a particular product, but those skills should also be transferable (but to a lesser extent) to the same product category (like a bed manufacturing worker will be pretty good at working with furniture in general), and their skills are least transferable to manufacturing in general. They'd still be better than an entry level person since they have general experience in manufacturing. They'll still want the best paying job they can get, though. So they will switch to a higher paying job if they can get it. So a firm offering high wages will seek out workers skilled in that particular product, but they'll take workers from other industries before they take an entry level worker, even if that experienced worker was working more efficiently in his previous job (but that had lower pay). This means you could have entire industries of more skilled workers, and entire industries that keep getting stuck with entry level workers as their experienced workers get poached away by higher paying industries.
This can mean that if a city has a lot of expertise in an area, a new firm could pop up and more easily attract skilled workers, sort of like Silicon Valley is a great place to find computer technology workers, and Detroit may have a lot of vehicle assembly line workers. If you went and opened a new factory of some type in a city with no businesses of that type, you'd be limited to a certain level of expertise since you would be the only one training workers in that industry (so you'd have to keep training newer workers rather than constantly poaching expert workers). And businesses in the city that offer high wages will still take your workers away, even if it's a different industry, unless they already have better option available.
I also think workers could naturally gain expertise in an occupation over time, but they could also have training to speed it up. That does raise interesting issues about training workers only to get poached by higher paying employers. But perhaps employee retention should be a valid concern, including the possibility of making an employee too valuable for your firm to keep.
Skill Affects Quality
Worker expertise already affects the quantity that workers can process. But perhaps it should also affect quality. An experienced toy doll maker might do a better job at stuff and stitching the doll. A car manufacturing line worker might do a better job at identifying and fixing imperfections. A livestock processor might be better at cutting the meat properly and making sure undesired pieces don't get through (cartilage or bone, etc.). Perhaps the effect of labor can vary by product, but perhaps it already does in the form of the dependence on raw material quality versus tech quality. High tech dependence usually means that the work is more automated, while higher raw material quality usually means the worker is more of a skilled crafter. Alternatively, products could have the quality breakdown be tech level, material quality, and worker expertise.
I think this can be important for determining wages, though, so that wages are higher in industries where worker expertise is more important (and where consumers care a lot about quality for that product).
Wage Level Changes, Unemployment, Population, Cost of living, Land Values
The minimum wage you need to offer (which is set automatically) will be dependent on unemployment and population growth and immigration/emigration. If there's insufficient housing, then population growth suffers, and the labor force can't grow. That can keep unemployment low, which can force higher wages as businesses compete for labor. Higher wages also attract more population. Lower wages hurts population growth, possible even causing emigration. But cost of living is a factor as well, so what is a good wage in city with a low cost of living might be a low wage in city with a high cost of living. Cost of living may also be influenced by land values and rents. There may also be issues with desirability of a city. People want attractions and services, low costs of living, and low unemployment. There's could be a lot more details to look at here.
Education
Education could play a role in the ability of workers to do jobs well. Certainly, R&D could be made to be heavily dependent on educated workers, and so it may be best to set up in high wage, developed cities even if the wages are higher. I'm not sure how education should affect other jobs. It could be a positive modifier that works in addition to expertise. Or labor can have specific educations, like in retail, manufacturing, farming, and so workers with the right educations will be more valuable, or it can be product class specific. That would also mean that there may be shortages of educated entry level workers, and that it may change over time as students seek educations in the areas that are booming. But maybe this is a bit redundant with expertise from experience and training. Another option I can think of is that there would be different jobs involved in a firm, and some of those benefit heavily from education, like management and specialists, as opposed to line workers.
It'd be nice to replicate some of the advantages high income cities (countries) have over low income cities (countries), which is in part education. Another thought might be that higher education could make it more feasible to develop and maintain complicated machinery to do tasks where wages are high, which can outweigh the savings from using more low wage workers in more manual labor.
If the game introduced services, they could also benefit from education more than manufacturing.
City Simulation
I think the ideas I've started to outline here could be useful for the type of stuff being looked at in the city simulation forum. For example, a mayor of the city could potentially have a lot of things to influence with these game mechanics. Education, housing, welfare, environmental regulation, healthcare, etc., which are things that in some way can affect the desirability of a city for business and the people, the quality of workers and average wages, etc.
Anyway, those are the initial thoughts I have.