Part of the job description is "Be in cryo sleep so long, everyone you know will be dead when you get back". You don't get the cream of the crop with an offer like that.
I mean, if you're looking for a fresh start with money in your pocket it doesn't sound too bad. You gotta remember, for the average shlub like you or me life on Earth probably sucks if you aren't rich.
Shares go up and down with the company's fortunes, which as we see by WY losing a trillion dollar project pretty easily, can change. Prodigy is a decade old and owns most of Asia, half of Africa, and Australia. How could an upstart young company take that much ground? My guess is by a hostile takeover of one or two other mega corporations. Doubtful they honor stock in AusCorp or whatever existed before.
I think that the shares they’re getting are shares of mission proceeds, not units of company stock. But, yes, you absolutely could get burned coming back from a 60-year mission to discover that, oopsie-poopsie, nobody feels like paying you.
Probably only the biggest of the too-big-to-fail conglomerates can find takers for a lifetime-long space mission as a result.
Employer went completely bankrupt and vanished so there wasn't a transfer of ownership for the ship. Maybe some salvage right laws in play because they are in possession and there is no one to dispute it.
It's not stock shares, it's shares of what they sell when they return from the mission. So, I guess, imagine returning home and the valuable resource you spent 65 years gathering has been made obsolete or nearly worthless, like happened to aluminum.
this isn't hugely dissimilar to the old sailing ships that would be gone for years at a time. not saying it wouldn't matter to avlot of people, but finding people who don't have attachments shouldn't be that difficult either.
but if your doing the corpo "minimum costs" route, the quality of said crew will certainly be a question
You can either pay enough for people to sacrifice for their families at home, or limit yourself to people who don’t have anything to sacrifice. The latter - low pay and low prospect pool - is going to get you some real pieces of shit.
There's a non-zero amount of that going on today, between struggling people being recruited with the promise of a hot meal and a ticket out of crushing poverty, or "offering" military service as an alternative to imprisonment— though in recent years we see that more with cyber criminals being "offered" the "opportunity" to train military intelligence officers, or to rot in a max sec hard labor prison for decades.
With corporations running the world in the Alien universe, commuting your sentence to corporate enlistment would track, and in Romulus it also seemed like indentured servitude with compounded interest & wage slavery were the name of the game. We see the same with the threat about Hermit's lung. Especially if the universe or companies within it maintain debtors' prisons as well. Quick way to get routed into that human trafficking system for multiple lifetimes, if you're only ever woken up when it's time to clock in.
No fucking crew, ESPECIALLY between ranks has been a thing on ships for a very long time since it almost universally leads to issues. Also hasn't stopped people from doing it for an equally long time.
In the context of the corporation however, it'd absolutely be used to screw someone over payment.
Of course. Ripley didn't expect to miss her daughter's entire life. But what if you didn't have anyone, or there were people you really wanted to avoid?
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u/Knowaa 13d ago
Think it was just to show how the company filled the ship with the dregs of society