Mushroom Grower Shuts 3 Plants; 870 Workers Fired

One of the largest mushroom producers on the West Coast, Mushroom King Inc., fired all of its 870 employees in California, Oregon and Utah after defaulting on a bank loan, Mushroom King officials said Saturday.

The firings came Friday with only a few hours notice and employees at the company’s three plants in Ventura, Salem, Ore., and Fillmore, Utah, were given no indication of whether the plants will reopen.

“Boom, everybody was fired, even the guy who owns the company,” said Ventura plant manager Ruben Franco. “Close the gates, that’s it.”

Spokeswoman Marcia Kublanow said that New York-based Citicorp Industrial Credit Inc. has now assumed ownership of Mushroom King’s plants and is negotiating to keep them operating until a new buyer can be found. But she added that she does not know whether Citicorp and Mushroom King, based in Windsor, Calif., will reach an agreement before the crops begin to rot and spread disease in the next few days.

Mushroom King President Vaughn Paul was unavailable for comment.

Mushroom King bought the three plants in April, 1985, for an undisclosed amount from Honolulu-based Castle & Cook Inc., the nation’s largest producer of fresh vegetables and fruits.

Kublanow said Citicorp has been negotiating with Mushroom King for “several months” to avoid foreclosing on the company. “This was not a sudden move,” she said. “The company has been experiencing problems for a while and we had been trying to work with them.”

Salem plant manager John Stout, along with the managers at the two other plants, said the company has had financial problems since the beginning, partly because of the depressed prices of the white mushrooms grown at the plants. Stout said the wholesale price of medium white mushrooms had hit a low of 80 cents a pound last summer and wholesale prices have only begun to recover, reaching $1.05 a pound, in the last few weeks.

But the mass firings still came as a surprise to the employees, who had been encouraged by the recent rise in mushroom prices, said Karl Lawson, division manager for the the United Farm Workers Oxnard local, which represents 330 workers at the Ventura plant.

Lawson said workers, who are primarily immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia, have offered to clean up the plant for free to prevent the fast-growing mushrooms from contaminating the plant with disease. But he added security guards have refused to allow workers into the plant.

“If we don’t get in there, somebody is going to end up purchasing a mess,” he said. “The plant could disease itself out of existence.”

Lawson said the union is considering the possibility of the employees buying the plant in order to save their jobs. He said employees make a minimum of $6.62 an hour, and “job opportunities like that are almost non-existent in Ventura County.”