CROCKETT, Calif. — Vendors, churches and food trucks lined the street leading down to the C&H refinery for the annual Sugartown Festival here July 19, but the company didn’t show up — no booth, no skid of free sugar.
Instead, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had an information booth explaining why warehouse workers at the plant had decided, for the first time since 1938, to go on strike. The 91 workers are members of ILWU Local 6.
“C&H SUGAR: DOING ITS WORKERS DIRTY,” headlined the flyer they distributed. “Firing striking workers; taking away hard-earned retiree healthcare; forcing workers to work 10 or 12 hours without overtime pay; bargaining in bad faith; and more. …
“Don’t buy C&H sugar while its workers are on strike. Tell C&H to treat its workers right!” The flyer asks people to email jill.nohl@asr-group.com “to tell C&H Sugar to bargain in good faith and reinstate the striking workers it fired.” ASR — American Sugar Refining Group — is the monopoly that owns C&H.
“C&H runs a 24/7 operation with long hours, mandatory overtime, and weekend work. But when its workers get sick, C&H kicks them to the curb,” a July 19 union statement explains. “The Company’s proposal would eliminate 3 days of sick time and punish workers who take legally-protected sick days by cutting their overtime pay for work on other days.
“Worse yet, C&H is gutting a retiree health care program their employees have spent decades working for. Roughly 100 retirees and spouses currently depend on this benefit.”
Fairgoers discussed the strike and the issues involved with Ryan Dowling, organizing director of the international union. And many donated to the strike fund, picking up hats, buttons and stickers to show their support.
For decades ILWU Local 10 members have worked the cranes unloading raw sugar from the ships that dock at the company’s silos. But these days they’re honoring the picket lines of Local 6.
Local 10 members are picketing the freight entrance to the plant, slowing truck traffic to back up their sister local. C&H has started to bring raw sugar through the picket line in dump trucks and tanker trucks from the Richmond marine terminal 15 miles away.
The bulk carrier Tai Herald was partially unloaded there, avoiding Local 10’s picket line. The sugar was dumped on the concrete and covered with tarps. The terminal is in an EPA Superfund site, contaminated for decades by DDT.
Company sues to restrict pickets
The company filed suit against the union, seeking a temporary restraining order to restrict picketing.
“We have rules about how we conduct ourselves on the picket line,” Gabriel Solomon, a Local 10 business agent, told the Militant on the picket line. “They are filming everything. They want to break our momentum so they can unload the ship that’s sitting there, and the next one.” The Tai Herald is now docked at the plant, but the company hasn’t yet tried to unload the rest of its sugar. Another ship, the Independent, full of raw sugar from Guatemala, is idling in the San Francisco Bay.
One key challenge in the strike is that the production workers in the plant, members of the Sugar Workers, a union affiliated with the Seafarers International Union, have a different expiration date in their union contract and have kept working. There has been an ongoing discussion about whether they should honor the warehouse workers’ picket line, even though the bosses have threatened to fire them if they do so.
On July 16 they voted not to honor the ILWU Local 6 pickets in a vote of 128 to 76. After meetings in their union hall to hear from both Local 6 representatives and the officers of their own union, they had to move to a company office building to vote under the watchful gaze of management.
“It’s still a fight to win them,” Solomon said. “Corporations are all about profit. They want to show labor we are weak. But together we are strong. Like the fingers on your hand, if we stick together, we create a strong fist of solidarity.”
“We were taught by my parents and by my parents’ parents never to cross a picket line,” Local 6 member Sean McEntorffer said. He and his brother both work at C&H. “My dad worked here 40 years.”
While student musicians performed at the festival, the union’s banner could be seen stretched in front of the plant, saying “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Young Filipino activists organized a rally during a break in the performances to support the strike, drawn by the fact that the sugar on the Tai Herald came from Negros Island in the Philippines. Union spokespeople thanked them for their solidarity.
“We’ve had support from the nurses and the grocery clerks from Safeway and Lucky,” Rita Gomez, a Local 6 retiree, said. A banner donated by a delegation from the Canadian ILWU hung from the canopy above her head.
Negotiations are continuing, after having been cut off for weeks. Otis Brown, Local 6 chief steward and 25-year veteran in the plant, said in the union’s July 19 statement, “C&H’s behavior at the bargaining table has been insulting They’ve threatened us and treated us like we don’t understand basic math, like how overtime works.”
Show your solidarity! Organize your union, school or community group to email the company at jill.nohl@asr-group.com saying you support the workers. Come picket in Crockett! Donate to the strike fund at square.link/u/ifFpgkRO.