For nearly a month, Joe Boyce slept on an air mattress in his factory office. He and 42 of his co-workers had agreed to stage a “live-in” at the Braskem petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania, working 12-hour shifts and then crashing in their makeshift bedrooms to provide the raw materials used to create personal protective equipment.
By the end of their 28-day live-in, Boyce and the other men, each of whom had volunteered, produced 40 million pounds of material, which could make nearly 500 million N95 masks or 1.5 billion surgical masks, according to Braskem’s CEO Mark Nikolich.
“It just makes you immensely proud to be associated with a team like that,” Nikolich told the Washington Post. The purpose of the live-in was not just to produce as much raw material as possible, but also to limit public exposure. This way, employees wouldn’t be worried about catching the virus while traveling back and forth, and nonessential personnel could stay home.
“We’ve almost been the lucky ones, I’ll say, for the last 28 days because I haven’t had to stand 6 feet from somebody,” Boyce told local news station WPVI. “I haven’t had to put a mask on.”
The men were paid overtime for their work, and the Braskem plant included a built-in wage increase for off-time hours as well. But the live-in wasn’t just about the money, Boyce said — it was about giving back in the best way the Braskem plant knew how.
But to do that, the men had to make sacrifices, too. Visitors weren’t allowed, and they had to make do with what they had. One worker missed the birth of his first grandchild. On the 14th day, the workers’ families organized a “drive-by visit,” which gave a “boost to all the guys,” according to Boyce.
And when the day finally came to leave the plant, Boyce said he was ready.
“We wanted to walk out as a team. Everybody felt that way,” he told the Washington Post. “It really hit me when my car got a little ways down from the plant — I’m finally going to see my family.”
