'Didn’t care about us': Company JD Vance bankrolled known for 'nightmare' work environment

13 August 2024

Before he launched his political career, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) was a venture capitalist who funded several fledgling companies. One of those was an Eastern Kentucky-based agricultural startup with particularly hellish working conditions, according to a new report.

CNN reported Tuesday that AppHarvest — which Vance propped up with millions of dollars in seed capital — had a reputation among its employees for a brutal work environment in which basic safety measures were routinely ignored. Even though AppHarvest has since gone under, the outlet noted that the testimonies from the company's former employees undercut the Ohio senator's claims of being a champion for the impoverished Appalachian underclass.

“Eastern Kentucky is well-known for people coming and going. They start up companies, then they disappear,” former AppHarvest worker Anthony Morgan told CNN. “They didn’t care about us.”

Morgan said that initially, employees were treated well and given a benefits package that was far more competitive than other employers in the area. But once managers were pressured about increasing production quotas, employees were forced to work much longer hours, and the company cut its employer-sponsored health coverage for its workers.

“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 seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”

AppHarvest billed itself as a company dedicated to hiring people in economically distressed areas like Eastern Kentucky, and Morgan said the company was "the talk of the town" at one point due to its star-studded board. Martha Stewart once sat on the company's board alongside Vance, who at the time was a prominent anti-Trump Republican riding high from his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But after Morgan organized a sit-in to protest working conditions, he was fired for taking time off to receive medical care from an injury he sustained on the job.

"It was a nightmare that should have never happened," Morgan told CNN.

Shelby Hester, who was hired at AppHarvest's 60-acre greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky as a crop care specialist in 2021, said she was taken in by the company's lofty messaging about sustainable agriculture. A recent graduate of nearby Morehead State University (full disclosure: this author graduated from Morehead State University) Hester said she was initially performing well despite the high temperatures inside the greenhouse and long hours. However, she noted that the company didn't provide employees with adequate safety gear.

"I had to bring in my own N95 masks, because I was getting sick from the amount of mold and just nasty stuff that was in there," she said.

According to Hester, AppHarvest accounted for its high employee turnover by hiring migrant farm workers from Guatemala and Mexico. Those workers were notably sent home when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) toured AppHarvest's greenhouse.

"They brought Mitch McConnell into the greenhouse, and they sent every single Hispanic worker home before he got there,” Hester told the network. “He then proceeded to have a speech about how we were taking the jobs from the Mexicans.”

Click here to read CNN's report in full.

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