Realm Adds Just 29,000 Hirelings as Guilds Hide Behind Wait-and-See Shields

The Royal Bureau of Labor Tallies reported on Friday that Waterdeep's employers added only 29,000 hirelings in September. The counting-houses had predicted around 90,000. (I have checked this four times. The number does not improve.) The share of able workers without a post climbed from 4.1 to 4.2 percent, which sounds like a rounding error until you remember that each tenth of a percent is a great many people holding a great many empty lunch pails.

It gets worse in the footnotes, where I live. The Bureau also took a quill to its earlier work and shaved a combined 60,000 hirings off July and August. August alone fell from 162,000 to 133,000. So the realm did not merely hire fewer people this month. It discovered it had hired fewer people than it thought last month, too. My aunt Marigold, who keeps her savings in a boot, says this is exactly why she does not trust any figure that can be revised after she has already spent it.

Where did the jobs go? Healing houses and the stonework trades kept hiring, and a few forges did too. The counting-houses and the insurance underwriters of the Merchant Princes shed staff. When the people who count the money start losing their own posts, I take it personally.

Now the Loaf Index, which I will not apologize for. On the current index one honest loaf costs 4 gp. The average hireling earns 37 gp and 81 cp an hour, or about nine and a half loaves. That is fine, if you have the job. The monthly raise on that wage was one tenth of one percent, a gain of roughly 4 cp. A loaf costs 400 cp. Your monthly raise buys you one hundredth of a loaf, which is a crumb, and I would not call it a loaf by any measure.

Here is the part that keeps me awake. The Federal Reserve of Waterdeep raised its rate in September to between three and three-quarters and four percent, its first hike in three years, to fight prices that refuse to settle. A weak hiring month would normally argue for mercy. But inflation is still running near 3.4 percent, so the Fed is stuck between a sagging labor market and a stubborn grocery bill. Treasury yields dipped on the news and the gamblers on the trading floor cheered, because bad news about your neighbor's job is good news about their mortgage. The odds of another hike on 28 October have fallen to about one in four. One guildmaster of a hiring house told reporters that employers are 'taking a wait-and-see approach' because of inflation, debt, and fears that the great enchanted-golem bubble will pop. That is a sensible thing to say, and also the reason nobody got hired.

The next price report arrives Wednesday. I have cleared my calendar and bought flour.

What this means for your pantry: keep your post, ask for a raise in loaves rather than copper, and do not let anyone tell you the market will sort itself out. It has not sorted out so much as a drawer.

— B.T. (Loaf Index: see sidebar)