Michigan's auto plants and workers, along with the state's other industries, are ready to retrofit factories to make ventilators and other equipment the nation's hospitals need to care for people suffering from the coronavirus, but the effort can't be undertaken overnight, Sen. Gary Peters said Friday.
"We have amazing engineers," the Michigan Democrat said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "We have the best workers. Highly skilled workers that can turn it around. It takes time. What they need are direct orders coming in...we have the Defense Production Act. The administration has to start saying, we need these businesses to start doing that."
However, Peters warned that one must be realistic about the shift.
"You have to change production lines from the auto assembly," he said. "It is not something you do overnight."
Peters said he's also spoken with the CEO of Steelcase, the office furniture manufacturer in Michigan, and he is also ready to help with the healthcare effort.
"Office furniture demand is going down as people are working at home," said Peters. "He told me, 'we can make hospital bed, gurneys, partitions to keep people safely separated.'"
People need to keep working, he added, and not everyone can shelter in place.
"You have to keep the economy moving," said Peters. "We have to have people continuing to work. You've got to continue to have some manufacturing going on. If you have complete shutdowns, I think it is important to realize, if you completely shut down industries, it is not like you can just push a button at some point in the future and start it up again."
He noted that in China, outside of Hubei Province, the epicenter of coronavirus, most of the factories continued to work.
"They separated employees," he said. "They had partitions and found ways to continue to keep some of the economy going in parts of the country that weren't impacted as much...we have to do the same thing."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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