Lol didn’t notice that. Factory’s only raise wages if they are below 50% employment, competing with another building for labor pool, or have a certain profit margin but have pops below the minimum expected SoL.

In your case I’m guessing you still have serfdom because it’s early game. Serfdom applies a massive penalty to peasants to keep them from converting to ‘Laborers.’ So this means the only available pop pool to hire from are middle class (clergy) who are mainly working in subsistence farms and plantations. The tools factory worker has reached a wage higher than the subsistence farmer wage, and since the tools factory is massively profitable it does not need to raise its wages. And since it’s a limited labor pool it’s not going to fully employ. To fix this you need to increase the available labor pool, which you can do by abolishing serfdom.

Abolishing serfdom should open the floodgates, since the only people who could previously convert were clergy or bureaucrats etc (ie not serfs), increasing the labor pool and allowing more competition. It will trigger the factory’s to hire peasants, who have the worst SoL, which will then trigger the factory to raise wages because it is profitable but has employed pops below the minimum expected SoL. (All once the factory is fully employed)

Alternatively you could build a bunch of farms, since the peasants can easily convert to farmers under serfdom (who will later convert to laborers), but spamming farms in the early game delays liberalization as your increasing the landowner and clergy pop pool.

In other words, kill landlords :mao-aggro-shining: