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Unmasking Asheville

Updated on December 29, 2020 by Jon Reynolds

Of the many casualties stemming from the year 2020, the city of Asheville’s reputation as a cool and progressive mountain town may be one of them. For many, the erosion of this tiny North Carolina city’s image started over the summer when police began teargassing peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. For me, however, it started right at the beginning of the year, when my supposedly lefty, “revolutionary” employers at the Asheville-based vegan plant meat company No Evil Foods began showing their true colors.

Throughout January and February, No Evil dropped thousands of dollars on expensive union-busting lawyers to propagandize workers out of wanting to unionize.

It was only a month after we lost the union election that COVID reared its ugly head – and that’s when shit really hit the fan.

With COVID worries understandably growing among the production staff, management began huddling us into meetings and assured us that they were working to sanitize everything as often as possible. “This is the safest place you can be,” our plant manager at the time told us, going on to later deny claims that the virus lingered in the air for more than a few minutes. When one worker pointed out that they were immunocompromised and expressed concerns about the challenges of social distancing in a small facility where doing so consistently is impossible, the plant manager responded by saying that if we didn’t feel comfortable being at work, we didn’t have to be there.

Sure, nobody has to work in the middle of a pandemic, but the alternative is homelessness and starvation – and employers know this.