lmost every building in your city needs to employ workers in order to operate. Even if there are lots of unemployed workers in your city, a building cannot employ anyone unless it has “access” to labor.

When you build a new structure that employs people, it sends a recruiter in plain brown clothing to look for a nearby source of labor. As soon as that recruiter walks past housing (which needs to be within two spaces of the road), he knows that his building has access to labor – in other words, that workers can walk along roads from their homes to reach his building.

There is a limit as to how far people are prepared to commute to work, though. Sometimes a building won't achieve access to labor, even though it is on a road connected to some housing, if it is a long way away.

Once a building has access to labor, it asks the Labor Advisor for some workers. If there are enough unemployed workers in the city, they are immediately allocated to that building, and the building will commence operations. If there is a shortage of workers in the city, though, the Labor Advisor decides which buildings should receive labor, and which should not.

You might want to make different decisions about which structures should have the first claim to labor, based upon the particular situation in the city at that time. You can do this by visiting your Labor Advisor and setting some priorities for him, which he will always follow. If you set fire prevention as your first priority, for example, and food production as your second, he will always allocate all the workers he has initially to fire prevention, and then to food production. Should there be any workers remaining after that, he will allocate them as he thinks best to the other categories.