Should you make that? Employee-only edition

Day 5,458, 11:44 • Published in Canada Canada • by Wilhem Klink

Part Two
Read Part one here

In this article, we're looking at employe-only industries, Housing & Air Weapons. In these the owner MUST have work tickets to make anything. There's two ways of getting work tickets: the Plebian way of putting out a job offer in the Job Market and hiring some person who may work 0 to multiple times a day; and the Moneybags Way of buying a Tycoon pack with either genuine real world currency or fake internet "tokens". We're going to focus on the Plebian Way. We'll look at you Mr/Ms Moneybags in another article.

Air Weapons

Air weapons act very much like Work as Manager industries: each work produces a little more items and costs a little more in raw materials. Again, we're looking at regions with both a high (200% ) bonus and low (100% ) as representative of the ends of the spectrum. Those are not the absolute endpoints as it is possible to go below 100% and above 200%.

A couple of assumptions
- wage is market wage of 4,000. The top few job offers in Canada are all over 4,000CAD per work. Globally, there's a couple dozen 4,000+ offers.
- A raw material costs 729cc. Its lower than what's on offer in Canada, but globally there's lots for sale.

On to the table!



First thing one notices is everyone is a loser. Except Q4. As an oddity at eRepublik Tools, Q4s were selling for nearly as much as Q5s. Of course "people selling" is not the same as "people buying" One would be foolish to not spend the extra 25cc and get a better weapon. But I'm merely reporting numbers, I don't make it them up.

What is curious is that at market wages (4,000cc) no producer is turning a profit.

Of course that just means producers in low-bonus regions have it worse, right?



Couldn't be more right. Not even the wacky Q4 pricing saves them.

Let's do a quick check on different wages. Its clear that wages make up a significant portion of the expense and maybe one has a source of low-wage workers, through a work-employee agreement (where two people work for each other at a low wage), or you have an occasional worker that doesn't check the job market. So a chart might help



This chart shows the profit per unit from $4 (minimum wage) to $4,000 (market wage). Q5 Air can be cheaper than the market to about 3,825CAD wage. Q1 & Q3 Air can be cheaper than the market price up until ~3,000CAD in wage. We'll lay aside the Q4, which we're confident aren't selling at the price notes.
NOTE: if you're running a co-op where you give workers an Air weapon, you're really paying them the CAD value of that weapon.

Air Raw Materials

Skipping the table and jumping right to the chart



We see a similar progression where a Neodymium mine holds its production cost under market to about 3,600CAD, Cobalt to 2,500CAD, etc. down to a lowly Magnesium mine at 500CAD. At prevailing market wage, there's no profit.


HOUSES

Unlike every other industry, Housing is unique. Each house of a particular quality needs the same House RM regardless of the regions bonus. Those are
Q1 = 10 HRM
Q2 = 20 HRM
Q3 = 40 HRM
Q4 = 80 HRM
Q5 = 120 HRM

So any Q1 house anywhere will take 10 HRM to make. What differs is the labor to make it. The base number of works to make a house
Q1 = 5 works at 100%; 2.5 works at 200% bonus
Q2 = 10 works at 100%; 5 works at 200%
Q3 = 20 works at 100%; 10 works at 200%
Q4 = 40 works / 20 works
Q5 = 60 works / 30 works

One can see how both the bonus level and wage are going to impact profitability. We have two other items to consider - the price of House Raws, which we are listing as 765cc each, and the "market price" of
Q1 = 17,100 CAD
Q2 = 34,659 CAD
Q3 = 69,500 CAD
Q4 = 134,900 CAD
Q5 = 196,000 CAD
"Market Price" in quotes since there is a fairly active market for Q1 houses and a semi-active Q2 market. Q3 is very weak, and I do not believe there is much of a market for Q4 or Q5. A Q5 house gives an extra 400 energy pool, but at an enormous cost of 196,000. A Q1 house's extra 100 energy comes at a cost of 171 CAD per energy. A Q2's houses extra 120 energy comes at a cost of 217 CAD per energy, while a Q5 costs more than twice as much (490 CAD per energy). Its a boatload of cash to fork over for 400 energy for 7 days.

The chart:



Houses cost less to produce than their market value all the way through wages of ~3,400 CAD (for Q5). The three lower quality but more active houses can support ~3,700 CAD wages. None can support a market wage (4,000 CAD)

On to production in a low bonus (100% ) region.



The only thing the region bonus changges is it now takes twice as many works to produce a house than it did in the high bonus region. As one might expect it, scales nicely and the breakeven on the more frequently traded houses (Q1-Q3) is half of the high bonus (~1,850 CAD)

Lastly, House Raw Materials.



Still no profits at market wages as a Granite quarry costs 35cc more than the market price of HRM. Its also clear that working an employee in a Sand Pit is an expressway to losing money unless you're paying them less than 500CAD as a wage.
Well, we're going to guess that a low bonus region's production of Housing Raw Materials will be even worse.


Sand runs its losses right off the chart! In order to have some detail, I had to chop off Sand's 10,600CAD loss at Market Wage. None of the Raw Material companies can make it work over 2,000 CAD wages.

The surprising takeaway from all this:
Who the hell is paying people 4,000 CAD in wages? I understand that other countries may have slightly different cost structures, but it sure looks difficult to make money by paying people 4,000 per work.
So unless you have a steady supply of workers willing to work for far less than market (including the value of goods given as wages) hiring people seems like a good way to drain your bank.