Steel Factory Firing all Workers

[VickDore]

My steel mill was at full employment and the next week fired all the workers. No gradual decline. Anyone else having this happen? Playing Japan. It also happen to my lead mine. Demand is high for these products, cant think of a reason why this happens.

[Alex]

Did you switch the production methods?

[VickDore]

Nope, but after looking at the graph it may have been a few weeks of lay offs, so i guess it was a natural decline but still strange why you would have profitable steel mill and boom start laying off people

[Alex]

Perhaps it's not quite as profitable, and other buildings are snatching away the skilled workers?

[lefty1117]

praps the price of the component goods went up and it lost profitabilit

[VickDore]

Yeah You guys are probably right. I guess I should just subsidies to avoid layoffs

[Two-Tailed Cat]

Japan's Steel situation is a little tricky. Your only source of coal is Kyushu and there's no iron there. Until you get Hokkaido inhabited, you don't have a province with both resources. Remember that your local prices of goods differ from your national price. You may want to spread out your steel mills a bit to ensure that the price of goods and labor never gets too high in any one region. This can help smooth out your production, especially early on as you start to industrialize.

Another possibility if your market has been opened up is that someone opened up a trade route either reducing the price of steel or increasing the price of coal or iron. Coal is also used by pop as a heat source, so that's another possibility for why an industry can suddenly no longer be profitable. A tool shortage could also drop the supply of iron and coal if those industries can no longer operate profitably, this can be made worse if you have already switched to steel tools, so be careful here.

Finally there's the issue of labor. Even if you have peasants, they need to be trained to be able to work, and if there aren't enough they may have better employment in other industries. Use the Promote Social Mobility Edict and build universities to help get peasants who would work for the offered wage qualified.

[VickDore]

Thanks Ill try to keep all that in mind :)