Episode 564: Sugar

**Young Chomsky** (0:01)
Listeners, producer Young Chomsky here with a quick request, which is to hit the tip line. We have a special tip line episode coming up in honor of this podcast's seventh anniversary, if you can believe that. So please call or email with your best rumors, theories, and stories. The phone number is 646-801-1129, that's 646-801-1129, and the email address is tips at trueanon.com.
And now, the episode.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
So Alma, it's been a tense afternoon. Things look remarkably different now, because the hundreds of striking workers behind me are gone. Now that's because deputies told them to leave or face arrest, and I can tell you, ten workers were taken away and detained. Now earlier today, a labor union leader told us that several motors drove into the picket line and that several people were hurt. Here's a closer look from Sky 7 From above, you see the police putting up yellow tape, and you see a lot of deputies on the scene along with the fire department. I spoke to Trent Willis, vice president of ILWU Local 10, on the phone. Now he says there were both Local 6 and Local 10 workers on the picket line here today. Replacement workers have been here on scene, and more arrived late last night, according to Willis, and that sparked a lot of emotion. So Willis said two drivers drove through the protesting Longshoremen. He said the workers were not trying to block those drivers. Now according to union leaders, two picketers were hurt. Here's what one worker on the picket line is saying.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:29)
Letting the truckers know what's going on. They're bringing dump trucks. There's two guys driving dump trucks back and forth from Richmond here. We're not stopping over, letting them know what's going on. You guys are crossing the picket line. It's unsafe what you're doing. You're taking money in our jobs away from us.

**Brace Belden** (2:05)
All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Brace Belden.

**Young Chomsky** (2:09)
I'm producer Young Chomsky.

**Brace Belden** (2:11)
And this is the True Anon Podcast.
A little bit of warning, I have slept for, and I did the calculations this morning, I'm gonna guess it's gonna be about 13 hours over the past three nights. And so I'm running a little bit on fumes over here. Last night was a very difficult evening. My insomnia has gotten quite bad. And so this might be the worst episode we've ever done.

**Young Chomsky** (2:36)
You say that every time.

**Brace Belden** (2:38)
But this time I really think, I remember there was a point yesterday, I was like, uh-oh, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to pull it off this time.

**Young Chomsky** (2:43)
You say that every time.

**Brace Belden** (2:44)
I know, but this one is, this one's tough.

**Young Chomsky** (2:47)
But at this point, that's just a signal to the audience that it's like, this is gonna be one of your favorite episodes.

**Brace Belden** (2:52)
Well, let's hope so. But this is an important episode. This is not gonna be a very funny episode, but this is an episode about some current events. We were recording this on Tuesday, July 21st. It is 3 p.m. or thereabouts. And I wanna get the main part of this. That's actually a wrong way to phrase this. I wanna get like the top line over with before I kind of get into the history of this stuff, just because it might be a little bit of a long episode. I do not want people to miss out on what we're actually talking about here. So right now, in the little East Bay town of Crockett, California, a group of about 90 workers are striking a sugar plant. They are members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the ILWU, and they belong to Local 6 Joining them on the picket line are members of the ILWU Local 10, some members of Local 142 out of Hawaii, and members of the Defend Negros Coalition, many of them are young Filipinos. Inside the plant, which is owned by California and Hawaii Sugar, are members of Sugar Workers Union, an affiliate of the Sailors International Union, who are still working despite the strike and the picket.
Outside of the plant, on the water, I guess in the Carquinez Strait, a sugar ship filled with product for the refinery, the Thai Herald, which is crewed by a mainland Chinese crew, is sitting with its hold filled with sugar, unable to drop it off. That sugar is from the Philippines island of Negros Occidental. 19 people were massacred in April on that island in a place called DeBoso, including two American activists.
Actually, a slight correction to that. I wrote all that out so that I would remember all of it and not miss any parts, but things have changed. As of this morning, C&H is actually attempting to unload the sugar using SCAB Longshoremen. So ILWU Local 10 are the people who usually unload the sugar. They're Longshoremen. It's a Longshoremen's union.