> Let me reframe is this way: There is some emergency wage where his employees would enthusiastically work substantially more than they are right now. There's some price-per-mask where the owner would enthusiastically pay them that wage to get extra masks out of the factory. That price-per-mask would still count as a steal compared to the cost of a healthcare worker developing COVID-19. Everyone would be better off if hospitals were paying that price. So why aren't they?

Because your analysis is wrong? You seem be assuming workers are some kind of machine that turns wages into output, and the more wages you put in, the more output you get, and you can freely adjust output by adjusting wages. You also seem to thing he has a lot of pricing flexibility due to the demand. I think those ideas have several problems:

1. There's an obvious limit to individual output, and his existing employees are probably operating close to that, especially since his business was already under stress.

2. Human psychology is complicated, and you're ignoring morale. A logical robot might have the same satisfaction with a certain wage before and after he's made much more than that, but a human probably won't (and that's even an oversimplification).

3. His customers are probably going be unhappy with him for raising prices in a crisis, regardless if he had good reasons for it or not. He's already dealing with the problem of customers leaving after a crisis for cheaper competitors, and a price increase now would probably make that problem even worse.

> There's an obvious limit to individual output, and his existing employees are probably operating close to that, especially since his business was already under stress.

I'm as big an advocate as anyone for sustainable work practices, and I absolutely agree that most of the time working longer hours is counterproductive over the long term. But isn't working on an assembly line during a crisis pretty much the canonical counterexample? Output scales linearly with time even if you aren't feeling creative/fresh/energetic, and there's an urgent need for more masks now.

Why can't he hire people on a fixed term contract to avoid unemployment?

Businesses that try that often get sued by those employees after-the-fact to get the benefits of employment. Then the courts decide if they were really employees or not.

Like the current Uber driver case.

> Why can't he hire people on a fixed term contract to avoid unemployment?

There are laws about what constitutes contractors vs employees - both federal and state. If you satisfy N out of M items in a checklist, you are an employee, regardless of whether both parties want you to be.

Controlling how you do your job is one of them. If the employer directs how you can do the job and doesn't give you freedom to do it your own way, that's a major item.

If your employer doesn't let you bring your own equipment, that's another one.

If you do not have a chance of losing money on the contract, that's another one. Say you hire a contractor to repair your roof, and he screws it up. Typically he is expected to fix it even if he ends up with a net loss (or he can refuse and not get paid at all). When an employee screws up, the worst that will happen is he'll get fired.

And so on.

It's very unlikely these people can be contractors unless he's hiring experienced folks who know the equipment.

Fixed term employment contracts are an option too. They are quite common. E.g. nearly everyone in academia.

I think you have misunderstood the suggestion; it's not about contractors vs. employees, it's about fixed-term versus not.

Fixed-term employees are not classed as contractors. They are regular employees with all the usual benefits and rights of employement - except that it comes to an end at a pre-determined date, unless extended.

How do you expect businesses to gamble with a predetermined end date that will probably not match the actual end of the pandemic?

Regulations have many unseen side effects that end up causing damage, people should think harder about them and they would realize that in many cases (most in my opinion) they do more harm than good.

I see. So what happens when the contract ends? Can they not apply for unemployment? And if they do, will it still not affect the business's premiums?

Likely such a contract would be unattractive to potential desirable candidates unless he could pay a rate that would require higher mask prices.

There are plenty of unemployed people who need to pay rent. If such a short term contract - getting paid to do relatively safe work and help fight the pandemic by making masks - isn't appealing that's probably because he's not paying enough.

Everyone's already charging more for masks, he should be able to manage a decent market rate. To begin with, unemployed people in a pinch are probably willing to accept slightly lower pay.