Jeff TK

The company would compensate them well.

Full wages for the whole time, even when sleeping, and a full week off, paid, after.

They had more volunteers than they had space for.

I've looked pretty hard, and as far as I can tell no other factories did this.

Companies retooled to make PPE.

Ford and GM converted auto plants to make ventilators and masks.

Distilleries made hand sanitiser.

but no one else volunteered to move into their factory.

One.

And it wasn't emergency planners who came up with the idea, either.

It was ordinary people, looking at their situation and thinking creatively about how to do their part.

It worked.

In those 28 days they produced 40 million pounds of polypropylene, enough for maybe 500 MN95s.

These workers had made themselves extraordinarily valuable by doing something almost no one else could do.

When people argue about higher pricing during emergencies, this is what the economics can look like.

They were doing hard, irreplaceable work, the plants could not run without them, and they were paid accordingly.

Notice, however, that Brascombe made it possible for people to be heroes.

If the workers had been expected to do this for normal wages, this wouldn't happen.

The number of volunteers is not independent of the offer.

When someone figures out a creative way to fill a vital gap in an emergency, the people doing the filling should get paid like it matters, because that's how you get more gaps filled.