Warehouse workers at C&H Sugar in Crockett, represented by ILWU Local 6, struck on June 15, 2026, over wages, sick time, and retirement benefits, including the company’s push to strip medical coverage from current and future retirees. On July 21, as the picket line held against trucks and scabs the company was trying to run through it, deputies moved in with batons and tear gas, and after hours of standoff, declared an unlawful assembly. Multiple workers were hospitalized that day after vehicles drove through the line. According to the ILWU’s own account of the confrontation, also cited in a motion of solidarity passed by ATU Local 1555, deputies shoved a Black picketer into a plate-glass window, pinning him to the ground with a knee in his back before he and two other Local 10 members were jailed overnight. Ten picketers and supporters, since dubbed the “Crockett Ten,” were arrested and now face charges including failure to disperse, resisting arrest, battery, and threats against officers.
The company used the arrests as leverage: it declared an impasse, clearing the way for more aggressive use of replacement labor, and only backed off after ILWU Local 10 members refused to cross the line and the fight began to ripple through the regional supply chain. Under a deal reached in late July, ILWU Local 6 members returned to work on July 30 under the old contract, with negotiations continuing through September 30, 2026.
The charges against the Crockett Ten, however, did not go away with the return to work. On August 19, supporters and ILWU members rallied at the Richmond Superior Court to demand they be dropped, but the case remains open, hanging over ten workers while the company decides, at its leisure, whether to force a confrontation again. If C&H and Local 6 don’t reach an agreement by September 30, the strike could resume, and whoever is on that line next will be walking it knowing exactly what waits for them if the sheriff’s department decides to move again.
This is not only a local fight. C&H sources cane sugar in part from Negros Occidental in the Philippines, where nineteen sugar workers, including a Filipino American, were killed by the military this past April. Filipino activists joined the Crockett picket lines once that connection became known, a reminder that the sugar in this dispute already ties Bay Area dockworkers to plantation workers facing far more lethal repression on the other side of the Pacific.
When workers picket effectively and organize seriously, the state does not stand aside as a neutral referee: it moves to break the line, and prosecution or worse follows. At the end of the day the police, courts, and prisons are tools the bosses use to control and repress the working class in order to continue their profit accumulation at our expense.
This is the pattern the workers’ movement has confronted for over a century. In the years after the First World War, as factory occupations and mass strikes spread across Italy, militants insisted on a lesson later generations of workers have had to relearn again and again: the strike, the picket, the occupation are not legal privileges that exist because a law permits them and vanish the moment a court rules against them. They are weapons the working class has had to tear out of the hands of capital through open struggle, real only for as long as there is organization behind them. Every time those weapons are used well by workers, the answer from the bosses has been the same across a hundred years and every continent: police, violence, imprisonment, and worse.
The Crockett Ten is not an isolated legal case working its way through the system. Theirs is the latest instance of an old fight, and the response has to be organized workers making it impossible to isolate them and smother their struggle by continuing to build, expand, and exercise the same power that got them arrested in the first place: the withholding of labor, and the threat that more of their class brothers and sisters would join that fight.
What we’re asking workers in their unions and organized workplaces to do:
Put this on the agenda of your own union meeting now, before September 30. Read the facts of the C&H dispute and the arrests into the minutes. Move forward a motion of solidarity. CSAN’s model motion is available here and offered as a companion resource to this statement. It can be adapted to your local. And don’t let it end with the vote.
Keep building turnout, not just paper. Supporters already rallied once at the Richmond courthouse; the next court date and any renewed strike call both need the same organized, visible, multi-union presence, sustained rather than one-off.
Circulate the case across the labor movement, including its international thread. Bring this statement, CSAN’s model motion, and the facts of the strike and its connection to Negros Island to every other local, workplace committee, and rank-and-file network you have contact with.
Get ready now for September 30. If C&H and Local 6 don’t settle, the picket lines go back up with the Crockett Ten’s cases still open. Use your union meeting to discuss concrete solidarity in advance: sympathy pickets, informational actions at other worksites, coordinated public actions, and, where locals are ready for it, what a real withdrawal of labor in solidarity would mean, rather than improvising after the fact.
Treat this as one front of an ongoing fight, not a closed case. Whatever happens to the charges, this point remains: the ability to picket effectively is an essential weapon of the whole labor movement and worth defending as such. The next picket line the state moves against could be your local’s.
