For weeks in June and July, workers at a Maine factory making one of America’s most popular rapid tests for COVID-19 were given a task that shocked them: Take apart millions of the products they had worked so hard to create and stuff them into garbage bags.
Soon afterward, Andy Wilkinson, a site manager for Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer, stood before rows of employees to announce layoffs. The company canceled contracts with suppliers and shuttered the only other plant making the test, in Illinois, dismissing a workforce of 2,000. “The numbers are going down,” he told the workers of the demand for testing. “This is all about money.”
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