Class War in Sugartown
Crockett, California, is located on the Carquinez Strait, a forty-minute drive from Oakland, and popularly known as “Sugartown.” This small, unincorporated town of thirty-two hundred residents is the longtime home of the California and Hawaii Sugar (C&H) refinery, one of the last cane sugar processors in the western United States. For more than a month starting on June 15, ninety-three warehouse workers represented by Local 6 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) were on strike against a straight-up union-busting effort by the refinery’s owner, ASR Group, led by the billionaire Fanjul family. Members of Local 10 of ILWU, who unload the ships of cane sugar, joined their sister local’s picket line soon after it went up, the latest in the union’s long tradition of honoring picket lines.
On July 27, the ILWU and C&H released a joint statement:
“ILWU Local 6 represents approximately 100 warehouse workers at C&H in Crockett, California, who have been on strike since June 15, 2026. The parties have been far apart on a number of issues. The parties met with a federal mediator several times in July but were unable to reach an agreement. ILWU Local 6 and C&H have agreed to a sixty-day period through September 30, 2026, during which executives from C&H and the ILWU’s International Officers will participate in negotiations in an effort to reach an agreement that is good for the workers, the company, and the community. In a showing of good faith, ILWU Local 6 has agreed to return to work during this period.”
“Everybody’s positive, everybody believes it’s the right thing to do,” Cesar Garibay, a negotiator for Local 6 and warehouse worker at C&H, told SFGate. “We’re confident that something will be reached before Sept. 30.” What can be reached with C&H is still to be seen, and whether that is acceptable to the membership is another question. While C&H has withdrawn its declaration of an “impasse,” meaning it no longer declared its “last, best, and final offer,” it is unlikely to budge on major economic and healthcare issues.
Just a week before the ILWU announced its members were returning to work, it issued a public statement on the state of negotiations:
ILWU Local 6 would like to set the record straight. While C&H Sugar professes its commitment to the community, its actions during these negotiations say otherwise. C&H has turned its back on generations of workers who spent their lives making the company profitable and who live in the very community C&H claims to serve. For two months, the company has repeated the same “take it or leave it” offer to the Union: workers must accept a new contract that slashes overtime, sick leave, and retiree benefits, while offering wage increases that don’t come close to making up for the benefits taken away.
Chief steward and 25-year veteran employee, Otis Brown said, “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. They told us after one bargaining session that they would not change their offer, and that C&H could take away whatever benefits it wanted. Now, a month into the strike, C&H’s chief negotiator refuses to show up in-person to face the workers he’s hurting with these takebacks.” The ILWU highlighted the example of retired worker Larry Morrison, who worked at C&H for forty-three years. “He is now at risk of losing the retiree medical coverage he earned over his career if C&H gets its way and breaks its promise to workers,” the union said.
Strikers faced mass arrests by the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department and at least two picketers were hit by scabs driving their cars through the picket line, with one striker going to the hospital. Meanwhile, two hundred and fifty production workers at the refinery, represented by the Sugar Workers Association (SGA), who are affiliated with the Seafarers International Union (SIU), crossed the ILWU picket line for the duration of the strike, which allowed a low level of sugar refining to continue. Scabs were also bussed in by non-union limousine services, and according to one witness I spoke to, a frustrated scab bus driver threatened strikers, who were slow-walking, which is perfectly legal in California, through a crosswalk that delayed the arrival of scabs and disrupted refinery operations.
The militancy of the strikers clearly unnerved C&H, in a company statement, they fumed:
“Since the strike began, some union members have attempted to block employees and contractors from entering our facility to perform their work and earn their pay. ILWU members have sought to prevent the movement of trucks bringing raw material to the refinery and those carrying our products to customers who depend on them. They have jumped onto moving vehicles, slashed tires, cut off trucks on the highway, damaged tractor trailers coming to our plant, and attempted to block a bulk cargo ship from docking at our refinery using a small fishing boat.”
Sugartown
While Crockett leans heavily on its long-standing connection to the refinery, it also wants to shift its image.The local Chamber of Commerce is trying to promote the town as an arts and restaurant scene, but for a large part of the 20th Century, Crockett looked and felt like a quaint company town. SFGATE writer Erin Hallisy wrote back in 1995:
“For decades, Crockett prospered under the benevolent leadership of the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company, which built many of the houses in the hilly community overlooking the Carquinez Strait. C&H built clubs, swimming pools and athletic facilities, kept up the town’s parks and sponsored Christmas parties and other festivities. At one time, nearly all of the workers at the red-brick refinery lived in town, but over the past 20 years, workers gradually moved out, finding newer and better housing in Vallejo or neighboring towns in Contra Costa County. Now, about 10 percent of the employees live in Crockett, but many of the homes are still occupied by retired sugar workers who have maintained friendships with, and loyalties to, their successors on the sugar line.”
Many C&H workers may not live in Crockett, but they still have deep family connections to the refinery, following in the footsteps of grandparents, parents, siblings, and cousins with the expectation of good paying and steady jobs. One striker, Kendra Sparks, started working at the refinery at eighteen and stayed for thirty years at the C&H warehouse, told the Bay Area Current, “There was such a sense of pride in working here. Everybody knew what good jobs they were. The town itself had a lot of pride as being home to C&H sugar, too. But that definitely took a sharp [turn].”
Beginning in the 1980s through the 1990s, C&H began to shrink the workforce and curtail benefits. The workforce declined from 1,500 people in 1986 to about 490 to 500 people today. Things took a turn for the worse in 2006, when American Sugar Refining (ASR) bought C&H Sugar. According to the Bay Area Current: Almost immediately upon company acquisition, ownership rolled back benefits. In the 2009 contract negotiated between C&H and ILWU Local 6, workers were told that anyone hired after that year would not qualify for previously-guaranteed retiree health or pension benefits. It was a sacrifice workers made with the chips they had on the table. “Me and another 60 or so guys in here don’t have pensions,” said Manny Loera, a belt foreman who has been working in the factory for 11 years. “We’ll be working until we can’t, really.”
Meanwhile, working conditions in the refinery have gone from bad to worse. Edgar Thompson, an ILWU Local 6 bargaining committee member, said, “I started working here as a summer laborer in high school. Thirty-seven years later, C&H’s offer feels like a slap in the face. I work 16-hour shifts to keep the refinery running. Now, the Company wants to take away the retirement health benefits I’ve worked so hard for. We show up 5, 6, or 7 days a week for this Company. I’ve worked 19 days straight before with no days off. So I just can’t understand why they say they need to cut our limited sick leave and overtime pay too.”
Working conditions like these spurred—with the added dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic—the strike wave that ran through the food processing and distribution industries to the industrial core of the U.S. economy from 2021 onward. Rank-and-file workers repeatedly voted down union-recommended contracts and stayed out on strike to eliminate two-tier wage structures, inferior pensions, and endless shifts and work weeks, dubbed “suicide shifts”. While food processing and retail workers were risking their lives and health on the jobs, Corporate America and its CEOs were wracking in record profits and pay.
The Brothers Fanjul
C&H Sugar is a link in the vast sugar empire of the Fanjul family, known as ASR Group. If you were to ask your average acquaintance if they ever heard of the Fanjul family or the ASR Group, they would probably scratch their heads and say no, but if you were to ask if they know Domino, C&H Sugar, Redpath, or Florida Crystals, they would likely say yes. ASR Group owns them all and more, including the American subsidiary of the British conglomerate Tate & Lyle. The Fanjuls are the literal personification of “Big Sugar” in the United States, led by the brothers Alfonso “Alfy” and José “Pepe.” The Fanjul family can trace their origins in the sugar business back to the ownership of sugar plantations in early 19th-century Cuba. A 2004 New York Times profile of the Fanjul brothers revealed:
“Starting in the 1850’s, the Fanjuls’ ancestors began buying land and consolidating their control of Cuba’s sugar business. By the turn of the century, they were among the country’s dominant producers. It was a wildly lucrative business, and one built on the backs of poorly paid, landless farm workers. Money from sugar built an extravagant mansion that Mr. Fanjul’s maternal grandfather, Jose Gomez-Mena, stocked with fine European art, including dozens of Sorollas. In 1936, Mr. Fanjul’s father, Alfonso Fanjul Sr., married Mr. Gomez-Mena’s daughter, Lillian, uniting two of Cuba’s largest sugar fortunes.”
Cuba didn’t officially abolish slavery until 1886. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, huge estates like the Fanjuls were targeted for expropriation and the Fanjuls fled to the United States and began to rebuild their sugar empire over the decades to their dominant position today. The Fanjul brothers have been major political players in Florida and national politics. The same New York Times profile gave us some idea of their political operation twenty years ago:
“Pepe Fanjul, who has lavishly contributed to Republican candidates, and Alfy, who has done the same for Democrats, describe themselves as close brothers who maintain their political differences. Other political analysts attribute their bipartisan fund-raising to a calculated strategy of making sure that all political bases are covered.”
Sugar is a heavily subsidized industry that has made the Fanjuls billionaires with an estimated worth of $ 4 billion. They are personal friends of President Donald Trump and live near his Mar-a-Lago estate. According to Forbes magazine, “The Fanjul family has been wooing politicians for decades, but their bet on the Trump administration is their best yet, after the president added tariffs for foreign competitors and pushed Coca-Cola to use its cane sugar to make American soda great again.”
The bloody history of sugar hovers over the C&H refinery, which sources some of its sugar cane from the Negros Occidental province of the Philippines, which has seen some of the deadly repression by the country’s military against the local population, with nineteen people killed in April 2026, including a Filipino-American. Many Filipino activists joined the ILWU picket lines as news of the strike spread in the Bay Area. “What we’re seeing is a similar situation: folks in the Bay Area are fighting for their livelihood just as much as folks back home are fighting for their livelihood as sugar cane workers”, said Ricky Pataksil of Defend Negros Northern California.
The C&H Sugar strike was shaping up to be the most politically significant strike in the country. If the ILWU returns to the picket line in sixty days, they deserve wide support.
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