Mushrooms grown for the supermarket thrive on a mixture of straw and manure. Amid the pungent stink of ammonia, workers heat huge piles that spread the odor through the barns where they labor. They stack metal trays covered with the resulting soil high in the moist darkness of the sheds. Soon, familiar round white mushroom caps appear. Workers cut their stems and place them in 10-pound boxes. Runners ferry them out to a checker, where they’re weighed and counted.
An individual mushroom is very light, so picking 68 pounds an hour, as Ostrom Mushroom Farms demanded of its employees, meant working like a demon in the dark, dank barns, Jose Martinez-Cuevas noted in an interview.
“The smell was terrible. There were chemicals in the growing mix, which made it smell even worse, and they wouldn’t tell us what they were,” Martinez said. “The foreman would joke, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t die!’ If a picker protested, a supervisor would tell her, ‘If you don’t like it, there’s the door!’”
Last year, Ostrom’s management did show the door to dozens of experienced pickers, mostly local women who were immigrants themselves, and replaced them with crews of men brought in from Mexico under the H-2A contract labor program.
In filing suit against Ostrom, Washington state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, concluded that the firings constituted massive violations of worker protection regulations, including gender discrimination.
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