It's "participation trophy" thinking. Also known in Marxist economics as the Labor Theory of Value. They think that, because they worked SO HARD on it, that alone makes them valuable "workers." It has nothing to do with the objective value of whatever "work" they did, they simply deserve ownership of the thing because they worked on it. In their minds they would deserve to be paid if they dug a bunch of holes and then filed them back in with dirt.