Why are my factories not paying employees?

[General WVPM]

I already explained how factory income is distributed 4 years ago. There was however a small gap in my knowledge "Paychecks will under certain conditions be 0".
Based on many tests, I found the following relation: the factory pays minimum wage if 7 * Costs > Budget.

I based this conclusion on this data (from a modded version of the game). The number at the bottom is the costs divided by the budget. 1/7 ≈ 0.142857. I have done some other experiments and my conclusion seems to hold up.

Will Paradox fix this in another Christmas patch in Victoria 3? Don't count on it.
In the meantime, you could workaround this issue in your own mods by ensuring the costs of a factory are less than 1/7th of it's maximum budget.

Spoiler: Original Post

I still don't understand what these certain conditions are.

I ran tests with a glass factory in a one province minor giving the following results.

Revenue (Last day's pure income)	92.949	125.164	134.042
Costs (Market spending)	79.089	50.992	18.091
Leftovers (Revenue - Costs)	13.86	74.172	115.951
Paychecks	0	0	73.266
Capitalist income	13.86	74.17	79.32
Clerk income	0	0	0.55
Craftsmen income	0	0	36.09
Capitalists POPs	6	24525	49050
Clerks POPs	64	64	64
Craftsmen POPs	4077	4231	4231

FACTORY_PAYCHECKS_LEFTOVER_FACTOR was 0.4.
MAX_FACTORY_MONEY_SAVE was 200.
Factory level was 1.
Factory budget was at the max of 200 for all the data.
Taxes were at 0%.
Minimum wage was 0.
The factory was not being subsidised.
Tariffs were at 5% (3.4% effectively).

I can reliable 'fix' the 0 paychecks issue by cheating to get massive amounts of capitalists.
Changing the FACTORY_PAYCHECKS_LEFTOVER_FACTOR does not fix it. Having a factory budget under the maximum does not fix it.
Having minimum wage > 0 simply grants minimum wage to the workers, it does not share the profit with them.
It does not matter whether I subsidise the factory or not.

Does anyone know why factories sometimes pay workers and sometimes don't?
Maybe @Naselus, @diegoami @sdrasmu12?

 

[EUnderhill]

I could never work out a definitive answer, but it seems to be most likely to happen with insanely profitable factories with the presence of capitalists. Playing PoD/0 I could have a boot factory with the workers living the life of Reilly until a single capitalist shows and captures all the profits. Upon closing and reopening the factory, wages would be paid right up to the point at which the factory was full, and once again, all the money goes to the capitalists. Hope this helps a little.

 

[General WVPM]

Whether paychecks are paid or not seems to be related to the factory budget. With a budget below 550, I found factories tend not to pay their employees. With a budget of that or more, they sometimes do, sometimes don't.

I added my observations in a csv file attached to this post. So far, the exact logic eludes me.
The observations were made with 0% taxes, 5% tariffs, 550 MAX_FACTORY_MONEY_SAVE, level 1 factory, 0.4 FACTORY_PAYCHECKS_LEFTOVER_FACTOR, ~0.01% capitalists and subsidies (which were not required as the factory was making a profit). The factory employed mostly craftsmen and a few clerks. The factory had room for more workers. The factory could sell it's goods and mostly managed to buy all it's needs.

Edit:
Having capitalists or not does not seem to change anything, sometimes wages are paid, sometimes they are not.
Getting the maintenance goods or not does not change anything.
Upgrading the factory does make the factory pay it's workers. I think this is due to the budget being increased to 1100 max now.

 

[CivilizedWastes]

Im just going to speculate it might have something to do with a budget limit, maybe the game just ignores it if it's under a minimum threshold

 

[General WVPM]

As it turns out, this bug was reported back in 2013 already: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/hod-factory-salaries-not-being-paid-bad.683440/

 

[Guedes]

Are you using subsidies? I mean, even if the factories are profitable, do you uncheck the subsidies?

 

[EUnderhill]

Fixing it won't solve the much larger interest cash leak, so it won't be worth the coding hours needed.

 

[Guedes]

Fixing it won't solve the much larger interest cash leak, so it won't be worth the coding hours needed.

The main cash leak in the game comes from the buggy sphere markets.

Since i disabled SoI's in my game, i rarely saw a nation going bankrupt ever again.

But if i load Vanilla right now and sphere Portugal as Spain, even though Portugal has a pretty solid economy for a small nation, it will go bankrupt in 6 months.

 

[EUnderhill]

I forgot there ever even was a Vanilla...lol

 

[General WVPM]

Are you using subsidies? I mean, even if the factories are profitable, do you uncheck the subsidies?

...
The factory was not being subsidised.
...

 

[General WVPM]

Fixing it won't solve the much larger interest cash leak, so it won't be worth the coding hours needed.

So you find it ok that workers get 0 income for no obvious reason?

I know there are more issues, like the wage formula scaling with profit squared. Or how tax efficiency can go above 100% or how a input modifiers can reduce inputs to 0 completely. But these issues are not that influential, the no wages bug is influential as peasants will rise up because they starve whilst the capitalists (if present) will make huge profits. This may seem like a semi-historical 19th century economy, but in real life workers were atleast paid a little.

My hotfix has so far been to enforce a small minimum wage always.

 

[Guedes]

Yeah, well, i'm having a really hard time replicating this bug. I just loaded an old vanilla game with spain and observed a whole year and not a single one pop of the 1.5M craftsman to not receive a salary unless the factory didnt turned out a profit the last day.

Than i loaded up Belgium in the AHD bookmark and the same thing happened, even with factories with low budget.

Also, are you checking up the Craftsman pop screen to see if they are indeed not receiving the salary or just gathering the factory data?

 

[EUnderhill]

So you find it ok that workers get 0 income for no obvious reason?

I know there are more issues, like the wage formula scaling with profit squared. Or how tax efficiency can go above 100% or how a input modifiers can reduce inputs to 0 completely. But these issues are not that influential, the no wages bug is influential as peasants will rise up because they starve whilst the capitalists (if present) will make huge profits. This may seem like a semi-historical 19th century economy, but in real life workers were atleast paid a little.

My hotfix has so far been to enforce a small minimum wage always.

I've been using the minimum wage trick, although that only works sometimes. Most factories will pay out, just not the insanely profitable ones, and they can always demote to the RGO. Until the interest bug is fixed, I'll go fishing, hiking and gardening.

 

[Guedes]

So i was finally able to pin-point this situation happening, the best example being the steel factory in west Switzerland right at the start of the 1861 bookmark.

The thing is i think this is probably working as intended, because it only happens in small factories which are running with sparse and no continuous profits to barely stay above the surface. My guess is that the game has some code underneath that prevents paying workers (and capitalists, i was unable to see the instance where capis are paid whereas workers not, as in the OP example) when theres a risk that the factory aint doing so well, and there must be some variables to it, but mainly some already pointed out like low budget and inability to buy all inputs.

This also goes in the same direction this mod post.

I was unable to see this happening at large long term profitable factories. As such, i dont think this has any big implications like fearing hugely profitable and big factories not paying its workers and resulting in a high militancy spiral (unless one is subsidizing of course) at a national level. Any nation with a fairly developed successful industry should get beyond this situation rather quickly.

 

[EUnderhill]

So i was finally able to pin-point this situation happening, the best example being the steel factory in west Switzerland right at the start of the 1861 bookmark.

The thing is i think this is probably working as intended, because it only happens in small factories which are running with sparse and no continuous profits to barely stay above the surface. My guess is that the game has some code underneath that prevents paying workers (and capitalists, i was unable to see the instance where capis are paid whereas workers not, as in the OP example) when theres a risk that the factory aint doing so well, and there must be some variables to it, but mainly some already pointed out like low budget and inability to buy all inputs.

This also goes in the same direction this mod post.

I was unable to see this happening at large long term profitable factories. As such, i dont think this has any big implications like fearing hugely profitable and big factories not paying its workers and resulting in a high militancy spiral (unless one is subsidizing of course) at a national level. Any nation with a fairly developed successful industry should get beyond this situation rather quickly.

By opening and closing factories and looking then at the cappies cash stash it was clear that they are getting their cut of the profits. My boot factory in Kursk was making money ass-over-teakettle and paid workers well until the first capitalist came along. After that, closing the factory meant wages got paid right up to the time the factory was full again.

 

[Guedes]

By opening and closing factories and looking then at the cappies cash stash it was clear that they are getting their cut of the profits. My boot factory in Kursk was making money ass-over-teakettle and paid workers well until the first capitalist came along. After that, closing the factory meant wages got paid right up to the time the factory was full again.

Boot factory? Victoria 2 doesnt have boot factories.

 

[Guedes]

I haven't played Vanilla since the beta ended.

Well than, why are you commenting a thread about a vanilla mechanic if you have only knowledge about a completely different game experience? I expect the OP is talking about vanilla solely too, otherwise he would have created this topic in the user modification sub forums.

As for your boot factory, i dont doubt that a mod may have transformed a rare and seemingly WAD mechanic that prevents small almost non-profitable factories going bankrupt immediately into a widespread game-breaking bug that prevents workers being paid at any point in any factory, regardless of situation. But this have to be discussed in the appropriate mod subforums.

Fact is, that doesnt seem to happen in vanilla. As for the Capis being paid whereas workers dont, i dont doubt it happens, its just i couldnt observe it, which leaves me to believe it is even more rarer than the already observed situation where the workers AND capis dont get paid at all.

 

[EUnderhill]

Mods don't change the hardcode. It was there in vanilla, namely the huge clipper yard in NE England.

 

[General WVPM]

It's a bug in the hard coded part of Victoria 2 that affects mods and vanilla alike. Using mods we can reduce the severity by adding minimum wage and ensuring the max factory budget is above 500.

Yeah, well, i'm having a really hard time replicating this bug. I just loaded an old vanilla game with spain and observed a whole year and not a single one pop of the 1.5M craftsman to not receive a salary unless the factory didnt turned out a profit the last day.

Than i loaded up Belgium in the AHD bookmark and the same thing happened, even with factories with low budget.

Also, are you checking up the Craftsman pop screen to see if they are indeed not receiving the salary or just gathering the factory data?

I checked both. The factory screen is the most obvious one though.

 

[General WVPM]

I think I found the rootcause for the bug. Factories will only pay workers if they have 7 days worth of input costs as savings. If the maximum savings are too low for this, the factory will simply never pay more than minimum wage even if it makes a profit for years.