By  Hannah Keziah Agustin 

NEW YORK – On June 15, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 6 workers of the C&H Sugar Company went on strike to demand health and retiree benefits, and sick and overtime pay. Majority of the sugar processed at the factory in Crockett, California comes from Negros Occidental.

The strike happened almost three months after the massacre of the Negros 19 by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in Toboso, Negros Occidental. Two Filipino-American activists, Kai Sorem and Lyle Prijoles, a Bay Area native, were among them.

“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. They had been tracking where the sugar from Negros Occidental was headed.

At the picket, Pataksil heard from a factory worker who said that the exploitation started from the farmers in the Philippines who harvest the sugar and put it on the ship, and then it continues with the workers who process and refine the sugar.

“It [Sugar] comes with the price of blood and exploitation of workers both in the Philippines and the Bay Area,” said the worker.

Worker demands

Local 6 has been fighting for a fair contract that protects health, seniority, and retirement benefits, and advances fair working conditions through overtime pay and paid sick leave. C&H refused the union’s proposal, and countered with a deal that cut back on retiree health benefits. Workers rejected it and went on strike.

The Local 6 picket with the support of other workers and worker unions, progressive groups, and community members hindered a ship with raw Philippine sugar from offloading its cargo.

Ryan Calbreath of BULOSAN, a labor international solidarity organization in Los Angeles, California drove up with a delegation of workers in education, food service, health care, and retail from ILWU 10 to the Bay to support the striking workers.

Calbreath saw the cross-sector worker solidarity present in the picket—from the support of ILWU 142 based out of Hawaii, to the Taiwan-based union that represented seafarers on the ship, and to the Coast Longshore Division workers who helped prevent the cargo ship from offloading.

“The same boss that’s gonna exploit you in the United States is exploiting people just like you in other countries,” said Calbreath. “When we dig into the particulars we can broaden our fight and strengthen our resolve and have more support in the picket line.”

Because BULOSAN helps connect local worker fights to the global supply chain, they were also able to call for justice for the Negros 19 and garner support for the Defend Negros campaign.

“C&H Sugar directly benefits from the suppression of farmworkers in Negros and other parts of the world,” said Calbreath.

Richmond City Council Member Claudia Jimenez said that in this economy, people deserve good income. “Multinationals like C&H makes a ton of money so there is no excuse for them not to bargain in good faith,” she said. 

Jimenez, alongside workers and community members, called on C&H to go back to the negotiating table and stop trying to close the picket line. 

The cargo ship bypassed the striking workers on July 6 by dumping sugar on a private port in Richmond, also in California, despite the pushback from residents. 

This also raised concern because of the health hazards this could bring to the local community. Several loads of petrol without cover were around the area where they dumped the sugar. 

Jimenez called the terminal “contaminated” because of all the other products of the refineries in the area—coal, cement, glass, scrap metal, and other contaminants that cannot be processed out of sugar. She has since called on the city to inspect the company’s sanitation.

“I am really glad that this campaign is connecting all the issues because […] workers’ rights is for everybody,” said Jimenez.

Defend Negros

In Negros, wherein about 60 percent of the land is dedicated to sugar cane production, a farmer earns less than a dollar a day.

Meesh Vergara of Malaya Movement Seattle, went in 2024 for an immersion trip in the Negros Island. She was welcomed by community journalist and poet RJ Ledesma who was among those who were killed in April 19 in Toboso, Negros Occidental. During the time of her visit, she learned about the dire conditions that peasants lived under, at the whim of corrupt, despotic landlords.

There was widespread poverty and food insecurity. “Farmers are forced to move to the city for work. If not in the city, then overseas,” she said.

“We believe that the reason so many of us are overseas is because of the problems rooted in Philippine society itself,” said Jom Dolor, Vice-Chair of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) USA, “It’s in a chronic crisis.”

According to Dolor, the Philippine government is run like a business, ensuring superprofits for oligarchs. On top of this, the signing of the Critical Minerals Deal and the Pax Silica Initiative, opens the country to the plundering of natural resources for foreign use, and displacement of indigenous people and farmers. 

“Both Lyle Prijoles and Kai Sorem decided to go to Negros to learn directly from the farmers and working people about their struggles,” said Dolor. “For this, they were murdered by the Philippine military.”

He explained that when peasant farmers have no land to till and did not find work in the cities, they are prey to recruitment agencies rewarded by a system that benefits from the labor export program through remittances. “The Department of Migrant Workers is the biggest legal trafficker of migrant labor,” Dolor said.

However, despite the violent conditions that farm workers face in Negros, Dolor emphasized how they continue to organize and fight back. In the same way, Filipino migrant workers continue to resist overseas.

“We are not just victims of the system. We are the ones who can and will change it and Filipinos around the world are fighting the root causes,” said Dolor. (AMU,RVO)