I don't know. I had a friend in college who was from Kodiak and she said it was a decent way to earn a fair chunk of change over a summer. I don't know where Sorhshah is from but up in the Northwest, Alaska cannery and fishing boat jobs are a semi-mythical get rich quick scheme for college students (working boats can be profitable but the first year you're out your share will be really small so you have to go back multiple years if you want to really have a chance at money).
Canneries being a good income turns out to be true but only because you are working for crap wages 16 hours a day, seven days a week so with overtime even crap wages add up, especially when you have no time to spend your money. I think I've shared this before but my cannery hired six workers for the six QA positions so that meant if the cannery was running we were working. Then it turned out to be a record summer for pink and we ended up working 40-something straight 16-hour days. Base pay was $6.25 an hour. Overtime kicked in for more than 10 hours in a day and more than 40-hours in a week, so if you consider Monday the start of the week we were permanently on overtime by Wednesday afternoon. Of the 116 hours per week we worked, only 28 were at base pay (or something like that). So over that six-week peak span I made about $6,000 plus the slower shoulder periods leading up and down filling out the 11 weeks I was there (the first two weeks I worked a total of about 4 hours and almost left thinking I had been completely scammed). For a college kid about $7,000 total was a nice piece of change.
I didn't return the next summer because I got divorced on my return and no longer had a reason to try to accumulate a lot of money in a few months and went to grad school in Hawaii instead.
|
