August 15, 2024
Well this can’t be good….
CNN reports that the workplace conditions at GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s former startup, AppHarvest, are described as a “nightmare.”
After facing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, AppHarvest declared bankruptcy in 2023, and dozens of former employees labeled their experience as less than pleasurable as Vance vowed to help the working-class Kentuckians. Public documents and interviews reveal employees were forced to work in grueling conditions inside the company’s greenhouse as temperatures soared into the triple digits.
Several complaints were filed with the US Department of Labor and a Kentucky regulator between 2020 and 2023, alleging workers were given limited water breaks at the startup and barely provided adequate safety gear. Some workers admitted to having suffered from heat exhaustion or injuries. However, state inspectors never found violations.
According to the New Republic, former AppHarvest worker Anthony Morgan accused the company of forcing him and co-workers to work on a 128-degree day. “I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan said. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up, and you’d see people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”
Morgan said things were going great when he was first hired, and then things changed. Production started falling behind, and workers were pressured to step it up. Then, the company cut employee healthcare benefits and other costs, but hours were increased, and breaks decreased.
Vance invested in several Silicon Valley startups after the success of his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” During a Fox News interview, AppHarvest Founder Jonathan Webb said that the Ohio litigator gave him a $150,000 check to invest in AppHarvest while other investors invested $50,000 each. The startup caught Vance’s eye because of his guiding principles, claiming a business should not only turn a profit but also help American communities, as the reason behind his decision to invest.
As a food production company, AppHarvest promised a high-tech future for the farming community of Eastern Kentucky. Vance jumped on board early on as an investor, board member, and public pitchman for the indoor agriculture company. “It’s not just a good investment opportunity, it’s a great business that’s making a big difference in the world,” Vance said during a 2021 Fox Business interview on the same day the company went public in February.
While the company promised to hire within Kentucky lines, eventually, migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and other countries were contracted. Then, in 2021, when Vance stepped down to launch his political bid for Ohio senator, the company started to drown in lawsuits filed by shareholders who were furious over plummeting stock prices and fraud allegations. Former employees wanted Vance and other board members to be held accountable for turning their back after misleading the public and their own investors. “Eastern Kentucky is well-known for people coming and going. They start up companies, then they disappear,” former AppHarvest worker Morgan said.
“They didn’t care about us.”
Luke Schroeder, a spokesperson for Vance, released a statement saying the politician “was not aware of the operational decisions regarding hiring, employee benefits, or other workplace policies which were made after he departed AppHarvest’s board” and said he simply wanted the company to thrive. “Like all early supporters, JD believed in AppHarvest’s mission and wishes the company would have succeeded,” the statement read.
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