JD Vanceās āJobs for Hillbilliesā Start-Up Employed Migrants Instead
For a self-proclaimed
āhillbilly heroā it seems
JD Vance doesnāt much care for the little man, if new revelations about one of the vice-presidential candidateās former ventures are anything to go by.
Before collapsing under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt, AppHarvest was touted as the herald of a new, tech-savvy era of farming in
Eastern Kentucky. Last year, the firm filed for bankruptcy after years of pursuing aggressive growth, in part by prioritizing migrant workers from Central America despite early pledges of employment opportunities for impoverished local communities.
By that point, the company had already come under a slew of complaints over unsafe working conditions, such as employees being provided with poor quality gear and insufficient water breaks while toiling in greenhouses where temperatures are alleged to have regularly soared into triple digits. āIt was a nightmare that should never have happened,ā as one worker told
CNN.
AppHarvestās failures further tarnishes the image of a working manās champion that helped catapult Vance to the
top of the Republican campaign alongside
Donald Trump. āI grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts,ā Vance told the
Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month. āBut it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by Americaās ruling class in Washington.ā
Such comments stand in stark contrast to testimony from AppHarvestās workers. āEastern Kentucky is well-known for people coming and going. They start up companies, then they disappear,ā Anthony Morgan, a former worker at the firm, said in the recent CNN report. āThey didnāt care about us.ā
āMaking the decision to go work at AppHarvest, like many of us made, the livelihood just went right down the drain,ā Morgan added. āI blame all of the original investors.ā
Riding hot off the back of the tearaway success of his bestselling 2016 memoir
Hillbilly Elegy, Senate filings indicate Vance joined the board at AppHarvest in 2017, though the firmās own documents state he joined three years later. He would go on to help channel millions of dollars worth of investments into the company, with its stated mission of creating local jobs by developing vertical, self-contained farming hubs in the Kentucky heartlands.
Farm worker Morgan says that by late 2020, the working culture underwent a significant shift, with cuts to healthcare benefits and longer hours in a push to meet ballooning production quotas. Bleeding employees, AppHarvest turned to hiring migrant workers in a bid to keep up the pace, eventually finding itself slapped with shareholder lawsuits over steady losses from the beginning of 2021.
A spokesperson for Vance, who left AppHarvestās board that April but continued to hold $100,000 in the firm, said in response to the recent report the vice presidential candidate was ānot aware of the operational decisions regarding hiringā and that ālike all early supporters [he] believed in AppHarvestās mission and wishes the company would have succeeded.ā
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