Homo Sapiens

Meng Shi returned to his construction team. He waited until the noon break to gather everyone together.

”The Group has a talent development program right now. They plan to train a batch of industrial technicians who can work directly at the automobile company in the future.”

Hearing this news, the workers all looked at each other in confusion.

”What?”

”Boss, how’s this going to work?”

He let everyone talk for a while before he continued, ”Every one of you can sign up. The registration fee is 1,000 baht. The training lasts for six months. Classes are from 6:30 PM to 10:30 PM every evening, for 20 evenings a month.”

A bolder young man spoke up, ”Boss Stone, can we work at the auto plant right after the training?”

’In your dreams,’ Meng Shi thought, shaking his head. ”You have to meet the grade requirements and pass the auto plant’s assessment. So you all need to think it over carefully. Don’t come back later and say I tricked you.”

”So what’s the salary at the auto plant?” asked another young man who was more concerned about the pay.

”During the three-month probation period, it’s 15,000 baht a month, same as the construction site, with food and housing included. After you’re officially hired, the starting salary is 30,000 baht a month, and there are opportunities for promotion...”

After speaking, Meng Shi pulled a stack of detailed brochures from a manila envelope and handed them out. ”Take a look for yourselves first.”

Soon, everyone had a brochure in hand.

Don’t be fooled by Siam’s per capita GDP of around 7,000 US dollars, or about 200,000 baht.

But ”per capita” figures like these are actually quite misleading.

After all, if you averaged Meng Shi’s wealth with the world’s richest person, he’d instantly be worth tens of billions of US dollars.

And Siam is a place with an extremely pronounced gap between the rich and poor. The super-rich, the great families, the royal family, and military officers are rolling in money, while the average income for the poor is less than 13,500 baht.

For example, at a Chiang Mai construction company, a regular construction worker has a base salary of 15,000 baht a month. With overtime pay and some high-temperature allowances, they make around 20,000 to 23,000 baht.

Faced with a job that started at 30,000 baht a month, they were genuinely tempted.

But being tempted didn’t mean they would take action.

People’s minds work in all sorts of strange and different ways.

Some wondered if this was a scam by the company to get their money. Others felt adventurous and were willing to take a gamble. Still others would hesitate, weighing the pros and cons, or wait for others to make a decision first.

Meng Shi had anticipated this, but he didn’t try to persuade them. Opportunities always go to those who are prepared, and to those who dare to take risks.

Besides, there was no shortage of construction personnel across the country. With the steady progress of the grand infrastructure plan, the major construction companies employed at least a million construction workers.

The automotive industry, however, only needed about 500,000 to 600,000 industrial workers. It was obviously impossible to convert all construction workers into auto industry workers.

Of course, Siam was also developing other industries, but this low-skilled labor force could typically only be placed in the service, agriculture, mining, and construction sectors.

After more than a week of consideration, 17 people from Meng Shi’s team signed up for the training. The others were still waiting to see, or had simply decided they weren’t cut out for studying and gave up on the idea.

After a period of consolidation, a total of 3,624 construction workers from all over Chiang Mai Province had joined the industrial worker training program.

These people were divided among five campuses, with a total of 36 specialized fields of study offered, all related to the automotive industry. The curriculum was similar to a junior college, but the training was extremely intensive.

There were even plans to use Qingye Automobile’s production lines for on-the-job training for these students later on.

Having its own industrial system was so convenient. Unlike ordinary junior colleges, there was no need for the school or instructors to pull strings just to find relevant factories for internships.

For any enterprise within the Homo Sapiens Company system, as long as it didn’t involve confidential departments, it was extremely simple for these students to get an internship—basically just a matter of submitting an application letter.

...

The construction site where Meng Shi worked was near the northern part of Chiang Mai Province. As a result, his group was gathered at a banana plantation, where a simple steel-frame warehouse served as a temporary school.

A sign was even hung at the entrance of the banana plantation, which read:

[Chiang Mai Province Banana Plantation Industrial Training School]

A total of 936 students were enrolled here.

After taking his subordinates to their respective classrooms, Meng Shi didn’t leave. Instead, he went to the academic affairs office.

He had taken on a temporary part-time job here as the teacher for the industrial safety course. For this, he had even gone to the New Human internal data station in Chiang Mai Province to download a large amount of material on industrial safety.

The company was very serious about training industrial workers; this was not just some casual, half-hearted training.

A course like industrial safety was, in fact, a crucial subject for every industrial worker.

Failure to ensure industrial safety was not good for the employees themselves, nor for the factory and the company.

If an employee’s health was compromised, it meant the company lost a worker. At the same time, the employee’s loss of the ability to work would have a huge negative impact on their family.

Meng Shi prepared his teaching materials and lesson plans very diligently.

In the automotive industry, things like noise, light pollution, toxic gases, sheet metal processing, and equipment transport all posed significant dangers.

For example, in factories in many underdeveloped regions, spray painting is often done without any protective gear. Working like that for a long time, a person would be ruined in four or five years.

Although the Homo Sapiens Company wasn’t a charity, there was no need to treat its employees as disposable consumables.

After all, it took a certain amount of time and money to train a skilled technical employee. Using them as disposable consumables was simply not cost-effective.

In a way, the employees of the Homo Sapiens Company were also part of the company’s assets. And these assets naturally needed to be carefully maintained to extend their service life.

Among the vast amount of materials Meng Shi downloaded, a good portion was written and compiled by the Homo Sapiens Company itself.

After reviewing these materials, he gained a better understanding of the company’s internal industrial safety regulations. He also came to a clear understanding of some of the stranger rules.

Many regulations weren’t just making trouble for no reason; they were lessons learned in blood.

For example, in the production accident case files of the Development Group, he found an incident where an employee failed to wear the required fire-retardant suit and mask and was disfigured by splashing molten iron.

After that, the steel mill made it mandatory for all employees in the steelmaking area to wear protective suits and full-coverage helmets. Violators were fired immediately.

Meng Shi knew that some people cut corners for convenience, or that the ignorant were fearless, completely unaware of those bloody tragedies.

Holding his organized teaching materials and lesson plans, he went straight to the classroom to begin his first-ever teaching experience.

The advantages of being a New Human were indeed immense. As long as one didn’t have the personality of a complete freeloader just waiting to die, a little effort was all it took to become an industry elite.

After all, their bio-chips and DNA storage devices held a vast reserve of knowledge. As long as they read more, searched more, and analyzed more, they could quickly become incredibly erudite.

Before he decided to become a temporary teacher, Meng Shi’s knowledge of industrial safety was also half-baked.

But once he got serious, in less than a week, he had become an industry insider who knew the field of industrial safety like the back of his hand. This kind of enhancement was terrifyingly powerful.

His store of knowledge was so great that it even surpassed that of a large number of professionals in the field.

The New Humans were the core strength supporting the comprehensive development of the Homo Sapiens Company. With so much talent, coupled with internal unity, it was easy to develop rapidly as long as they were headed in the right direction.