CNN’s expose on JD Vance’s failed foray into American business is brutal and something every American should read. The D in JD evidently stands for dilettante. Like lambs to the slaughter, Eastern Kentuckians lapped up Vance’s snake oil and then ended up in the hospital with heat stroke and without the promised health benefits they quit their old jobs to acquire. Then the company went belly up while Vance slunk off to Washigton DC.
Workers allege ‘nightmare’ conditions at Kentucky startup JD Vance helped fund
AppHarvest employees said they were forced to work in grueling conditions…
Despite promising local jobs, the company eventually began contracting migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala and other countries, numerous former employees told CNN…
“Eastern Kentucky is well-known for people coming and going. They start up companies, then they disappear,” said former AppHarvest worker Anthony Morgan. “They didn’t care about us.”…
[Vance] … worked at PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s firm. Thiel would later bankroll Vance’s own VC fund and Ohio senatorial run.
AOL co-founder Steve Case hired Vance in 2017 to expand his seed fund Rise of the Rest…
After about a week on the job, Vance took a meeting with AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb…
a few months in, Morgan recounted a noticeable shift in the company’s culture.
Production fell behind... The company cut costs, including the employer-paid health care benefits… higher production quotas. That meant longer hours for workers and fewer breaks in the brutal heat of the greenhouse.
“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.”
The conditions became intolerable, and employees began to leave the company in droves, several workers told CNN. Morgan helped organize an employee sit-in to demand fairer working conditions, and said that he was fired after he took time off for medical care for an injury he said he suffered on the job.
“It was a nightmare that should have never happened,” Morgan said of his experience overall…
“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,” Hester told CNN.
It was the heat, though, that took a toll. Hester echoed Morgan’s account that workers were routinely taken out of the greenhouse by medical personnel because they were suffering from heat stroke symptoms. Those who went to the doctor, she said, were told by managers that a doctor’s note was not a sufficient reason to miss a shift.
When scumbags like JD Vance swoop in and prey on Americans like this, when they show you who they really are… BELIEVE THEM. JD Vance is the definition of everything Republican voters complain about in terms of our economy in 2024. When given the chance to finally dip his toe into the world of American business and capitalism, he jumped in with no sense of personal responsibility, with no idea about what he was doing, he played around with other people’s money like a kid in a candy store, and he ended up ruining workers’ lives and then bailing on all of it to go re-package his snake oil salesman routine in Washington DC. JD Vance’s spoiled toddler like foray into American capitalism may only be eclipsed by his now mentor, Donald Trump, in terms of its total failure and callous dishonesty. And every American should look long and hard at what he’d do to our lives if he had the power as Trump’s bagman to Silicon Valley’s worst personalities and practices.