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In 2002, I was working on the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP) at the Scotford Upgrader in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. It was the first Mega Project I ever worked at and I remember being in total awe of the magnitude of the jobsite and sheer number of workers that was employed there. I kid you not, I have never seen so many fucking people in one place at one time EVER, excluding a Stanley Cup Finals game or a U2 concert…
They brought in all sorts of people from engineers, pipefitters, welders, boilermakers, and electricians to architects, elevator mechanics, teamsters, carpenters, and scaffolders from all over Canada and the United States; I was foreman of a crew of 12 and not one single person was a local; they booked up every hotel in the entire Edmonton and surrounding area, hired 130 buses to transport 65% of the workers to and from the jobsite; and what was normally a 20 minute commute to work, took over 2 fucking hours to get home after work because of all the traffic generated from that jobsite.
The money was abundant and it flowed freely; I don’t think anyone that worked there for close to a year made less than 6 figures. Yeah yeah, relative to all you Wall Street types making cold calls to fuck old people in Ohio for $500K a month, this is chump change. But for a lowly hourly wage worker in Alberta, post 9/11, this was pretty good coin and the place to be at the time. Fuck, it was the first time I grossed $130K in less than 10 months; not including what went into my pension, full health and welfare benefits, and other job incentives, like free gas cards every now and then.
Weekly brass pools where if one lucky employee bought a raffle ticket that week and got his name drawn, he took home a big green garbage bag with a $180K cash in it. There were weekly job incentive draws for TVs, boats, and quads.. The client, Shell, in addition to the little trinkets, such as Swiss watches, GPS units, lawn chairs, camping knick knacks they handed out to everyone every month, they also gave everyone incentives such as airmiles so they wouldn’t quit. I received an egregious 18,000 airmiles in which a third of those afforded me a free return trip for 2 to California for less than my 10 months of employment there.
Scarcity of exotic metal welders led them to cut their own side deals; a welder from Nova Scotia on my crew, who was only 1 of 3 that had an inconel ticket, worked a week in another part of the plant on some high priority job and cleared $6500 in 4 days with paid cab ride to and from the job from his hotel.
An electrician even made $80K selling chocolate-covered almonds fund raising for his kid’s dance club in 6 months!
But even with all the “easy money” being made and all the incentives to attract tradesmen from all over North America the client was practically throwing at us all, the turnover rate on that job was a dreadful 50%; for every 10 workers hired on, half of them either were fired or said, “fuck this shit, I’m outta here!”
I remember every 2nd day, if not every day, there was some sort of altercation or dispute, whether it be someone fighting with security guards, or with the bus drivers, or other workers, or their foreman. There were even a few wobbles, where the entire jobsite walked off the job and rioted in the parking lot over a fucking fence the client built around the construction site so to keep workers from going offsite to the parking lot for a toke. And in another instance, a wildcat occurred over rubber boots of all things.
The peak workforce for the $1.1 billion 3-year fast-tracked project was 10,500 workers with 23 million manhours expended.
Now let’s put this in persepective, shall we?
Yesterday AAPL sold off and continuing to sell off this morning because of the disappointing number of iPhone5’s sold over the first weekend and also due to Chinese workers involved in riots taking place at the Foxconn factory where they make these iPhones.
Apple announced they ONLY sold a dreadful 5 million iPhone5’s in 3 days; barely a touch more than the 4 million 4S’s sold in the first 3 days last October; and professional analysts were expecting more to the tune of 8 million to 12 million units sold; there were even calls for 20 million sold. ONLY 5 million?? That’s only HALF of what the majority of the analysts were expecting!! What a fucking joke, right? Disappointing to say the least. Apple must have problems with their supply chain. Could be the lack of demand for the new iPhone… This is BAD news. SELL AAPL.
In 2010, Foxconn reported they were producing a required 50 million iPhone 4s per annum. That comes to about 137,000 iPhones made every day; 1.5 phones per second. So, by the time you finish reading my little rant here, a bunch of Chinese kids, the same age as my own kids, has just pumped out 5 of these fuckers.
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| Lunch at Foxconn |
So, to sell the disappointing 5 million iPhones, these slaves that work at this factory took over 35 days to make them, taking into account, technology and on-job training has improved since 2010 and they are pumping out a rounded up figure of 140,000 iPhones a day now. To make the expected 20 million iPhone5’s, Foxconn still would have needed 5 months to make them.
So, you asshat analysts were expecting something that gets made in an astonishing 5 months to be sold in 3 fucking days!! And Apple expects to begin selling iPhone5’s in 22 more countries by Friday… Are you dicksuckers just pulling numbers out of your ass now??? Have you seen the iPhone5?? It’s not like they’re making chicken McNuggets here…
Foxconn has got 78,000 workers in that iPhone factory alone. Upon thinking of all the problems we had at Shell on the AOSP job with only 10,500 workers and trying to keep them from quitting and fighting with each other, that little scuffle at the Foxconn barracks was sweet fuck all comparably. They have reopened the plant last night and are in full production again today. Foxconn also makes Kindles for Amazon, computers for Sony, Acer, and Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, HP, Nintendo, Cisco, and Dell…
Only Apple can sell “much less” than these $500K per month analysts expect and still be “sold out“.
Does this not tell you dicksuckers selling AAPL today MORE about the overbloated expectations of asshat analysts than the problems with Apple???
Something to think about.
More perspective: Samsung took 2 months to sell 10 million Galaxy S3’s… 5 million iPhones in 3 days isn’t so bad in my books…
