Gimme a Break!
The official podcast of the Just Break Already Caucus.
Gimme a Break!
Labor Battle at C&H Sugar–Defend the Crockett 10!
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Lital and Edward are joined by Emily Turnbull, retired longshore worker and former member of ILWU Local 10's executive board, and Max from JBA in East Bay DSA to discuss the battle at C&H Sugar and the fight to defend the Crockett 10, trade unionists and socialists facing potential prosecution after cops charged the picket line they were on in July. We discuss the united front rally outside the courthouse in defense of the Crockett 10, how the strike is connected to the battle to defend Cuba and get justice for the Negros 19 in the Philippines, what East Bay DSA has (and hasn't) done to drive struggle forward, and what's next for the ILWU and JBA in East Bay DSA.
You can follow Emily for updates @EmilyTurnbullLocal10 on Instagram.
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Thank you for coming out today. Solidarity means absolutely everything. This is how we double the companies and the company everybody and the workers stick together no matter what. Um what a picket line looks like when it moves today, don't come, we need don't comment. Um let's just keep up, let's just keep up with wrong. Young is done if we're having a solidarity rally for the um for the ten people that got arrested. And so it's just to basically let let everyone know that we do have the right to strike and we can't just be you know stomped.
SPEAKER_01And they've arrested ten people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um the union and others are demanding they dropped their charges. What's gonna happen? You think they both drop their charges?
SPEAKER_00I'm confident there's enough evidence to show that, you know, we weren't uh that that that the charges can be dropped, but you know, we can't hold our breath for anything. Let's see what happens. What happened? We were walking away from the picket line, really, is what happened, and then the cops charged us. Uh I guess they had a, you know, bad plans to arrest everybody there, but couldn't do it fast enough, so they just got who they can. Um It was excessively violent. It didn't they didn't What did they do? They didn't they were just they're just getting on top they they got on top of me, like two guys got on top of me, they started like bending my you know my legs all the way back behind me, trying to like hog tie me. I don't even know what they're trying to do with that, but it was two m it was like eight cops on one guy. No, it doesn't make sense. First somebody walking away. How many two were arrested? Ten people, ten people.
SPEAKER_01And I understand that uh picketers were were hit by staff people working there, they're gonna jump. Why don't you talk about that? What happened?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, some of the truck uh some of the truck drivers driving in and out of the facility were not respecting the picket lines at all, and some of them were going as far as even hitting some of the uh the picketers with their cars and trucks.
SPEAKER_01Have any of them been arrested?
SPEAKER_00No, they have not.
SPEAKER_01I guess it's okay to hit somebody.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if you're if you if you work for if you work for the company, if it's cabin, I guess it's okay.
SPEAKER_01So what do you think of the significance of the struggle of today just for the union?
SPEAKER_00It's extremely significant. If we don't have the right to strike, we don't have any power. You know, so if that's taken away from us, then they can take away everything else, really. So it's it's of the utmost importance to make sure that we defend the case.
SPEAKER_04Hello and welcome to another episode of Give Me a Break, the podcast of the Just Break Already Caucus in the DSA. I'm your host, Lee Tal, here with my co-host Edward.
SPEAKER_02Hello.
SPEAKER_04And the audio you heard at the beginning is of Johannes, an ILWU local 10 worker who was arrested along with nine others while on the picket line in solidarity with the ILWU six warehouse workers strike against CH Sugar Company in Crockett, California. Local 10 members were not just there in solidarity, but CH has also used scab labor to do local 10's work. So the strike has directly impacted Longshore. The audio is from Steve Zeltzer's labor video interview conducted at the Solidarity Rally at Richmond, California Superior Court to defend the Crockett 10. This was a United Front Rally called by the Internationalist Group. Five of their supporters were arrested along with five longshoremen, and the rally was endorsed by the Spartacus League, Partisan Defense Committee, United Front Committee for a Labor Party, Freedom Socialist Party, Labor Militant, International Socialist Alternative Revolutionary. And there were also contingents from IBEW, IUPAT, ATU Local 1555, and of course ILWU Local 10. And there have also been motions and statements of solidarity from the Oakland Teachers Association and also Chicago Teachers Union. The rally also got a boost by being endorsed by musician and filmmaker Boots Riley. ILWU Local Six warehouse workers who had been on strike for over five weeks faced an army of scabs hired by the company to break the strike and strip them of medical benefits for retirees, overtime pay, and health benefits. To help us understand the significance of this labor battle and why the DSA and left must continue to support and fight for its victory. We have two special guests today. Emily Turnbull, retired ILWU Local 10 former executive board member. Welcome, Emily. Hi, that's all. Thanks for having me. She has been active on the picket lines during the strike and built support for the Crockett 10 in her union. And we also have Max from the JBA in the East Bay DSA.
SPEAKER_03Hi there. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_04He has also been active in building support inside the DSA for this cause. So to start, maybe Emily, you can give us some background to the strike, which lasted five weeks. There's a 60-day cooling off period right now. What are the key issues involved in the strike and what led to the arrests of the Crockett 10?
SPEAKER_05Well, the key issues in the strike was that the company CNH Sugar was demanding massive give back from the local six warehouse workers, including taking away medical benefits for retirees. For the retirees who worked for 30 years for CNH and were already relying on their medical care, which is it was just going to be taken away from them. As well, their pay their wages were going to be slashed because many of them work 12 hour shifts. And after eight hours they get overtime pay. But the company was insisting that it didn't want to pay overtime until 40 hours were passed so that they these guys could work be made to work three twelve hour shifts and then be not work for the rest of the week and their pay would be slashed. The company also wanted to take away six days, change their seniority system. It was really a wholesale attack on the union and massively decreased the living standards of the warehouse workers on the plant. There's only 90 warehouse workers. They work at one end of the plant. The the main people who process the sugar in the plant are the sugar workers' union. There's about 300 of them. And unfortunately, their union was scab herded through the whole strike. And it severely weakened the local six strike because the sugar workers union ordered their members to scab. In fact, some of them did walk off in the beginning with local ten and their union order ordered them back in. The company was reportedly threatening them with all of them with being fired if they dared to honor a local six picket line. Wow. That's just a taste of the kind of slave labor conditions that ASR, the giant sugar monopoly that owns CNH, maintains in their plantations around the world. Yeah. They wanted they impose it on the sugar workers there at Crock.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but so there's two unions organized in the plant. Correct. And and so there were pickets outside that LW Local Six had.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, Local Six had been maintaining pickets from mid-June when the strike began. Right. And they had attracted a lot of support from the community. Local 10, our members work inside the plant every time a sugar ship rolls into port with sugar, is tied up at the CNH facility, and local 10 members are the ones who unload it, unload the sugar and send it onto the conveyor belt. So there's about 25 sugar ships a year. It's a couple times a month where workers are ordered out of the local town hall. And there's also maintenance workers who maintain the unloading equipment in the plant. And all of us from the beginning we honored the local six picket lines and refused to cross.
SPEAKER_04Okay. And so they they used scabs to unload. Well they did to Yeah.
SPEAKER_05They yeah. Well what happened was because the strike was in a strong position because if the company hadn't been able to get any more sugar into the plant to process, even though the uh sugar workers were scabbing. But the company first brought in a sugar ship and tied it up at a non-union terminal and tried to unload it in Richmond. And then snuck when that got a lot of bad publicity and a lot of picketing from local 10, they snuck the ship back into Crockett and then started to unload it using scab labor, non-LW labor. It's at that point that the whole of Northern California ports, we all shut down, walked off the job on July 21st, and went to Richmond to reinforce the picket lines, shutting down the CNH facility for 24 hours. Because the picket lines were so effective then that the police, the sheriff's department, declared one of the pickets at the end of the day, picket lines uh illegal assembly. And as the workers were were trying to retreat and go back down a hill from the uh picketing site, the cops charged the picketers and arrested ten of them. Throwing targeting in particular two young black workers from local 10. One of whom was thrown to the ground. The cop had his knee and his back, just like George George Floyd. He has asthma.
SPEAKER_04He had to go to the hospital before the police even took him to the That was Johannes, who's we hear at the beginning of the audio. Exactly. Mm-hmm. So they arrested ten. Five of them were international screw supporters, five of them were EU, correct? Correct. What did they charge them with?
SPEAKER_05Well, seven of the arrested were charged with failure to disperse, which is a misdemeanor, and that includes the five internationalist group supporters, as well as two members of local ten. But three of them faced much more serious charges. One of which which is a potential felony. Right. Even the failure to disperse can can garner a six-month prison sentence or a thousand dollar fine. But these charges are much more serious, potentially meaning years in in prison for these guys.
SPEAKER_04This is a pretty brazen attack on the union, which is also a union that's pretty renowned for taking up progressive causes and and um having, as far as unions go, a lot of strength on the West Coast, obviously.
SPEAKER_05Well, we all understand it in Local Ten as the opening shot of the 2028 contract negotiation. Right. Our national contract is up in July 2028. And everybody knows that this is the opening shot. That if they succeed in taking away Local Ten's work in Crockett, which is bulk work unloading sugar, that they're gonna try to kill us with a thousand cuts going into the the 2028 contract negotiations. Just whittle away at the conditions and work of the longshore local. The ILA on the East Coast has already lost, I think, much of their break bulk work. Our contract covers bulk and break bulk work. And the basis of our strength is the fact that we're a coastwide union and that everything that comes up into the west coast of the United States by ship is loaded and watered by the LW.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so this is a pretty big battle here for labor. Not just obviously in California, but across the country. If they can get away with this, it's just gonna be more open season on working working people, especially if you don't have a union. I mean, these are union workers who are being attacked this way. So there was a rally in defense to drop the charges on the Crockett 10. They were supposed to report for hearings. So could you speak to what happened? I understand that they're not pressing charges. So that's a small victory, but there's still intimidation and struggle that's gonna keep continuing in light of that.
SPEAKER_05Key was the fact that that we mobilized in local 10 and got a a motion passed from the executive board that the union would mobilize its members to go to court to back the brothers up. That we had their brothers up and not just the brothers, but all of the Crockett Ten.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_05And in fact that's what happened in the morning. There were some seventy, eighty people out there in the court to go with the brothers. Now, the lawyers the night before the DA told them that they weren't going to be arraigned on the charges at this point. But they weren't dropping them either. The DA claimed he hadn't had a chance to examine the evidence yet. But it was still important to go to show the DA that in fact we have the back of our brothers and that this was an attack on the whole union and not just the LWU, but on their very right to picket for anyone in the Bay Area because they declared a picket line an unlawful assembly and arrested people for simply for the act of picketing. So it was a good turnout. Then the the internationalist group. Their hearing wasn't till one thirty in the afternoon. They held the rally at one, which uh united all the different groups you mentioned in the beginning. It was a very successful rally. And then we went into the court to back them up for their 130 appearance. All of the workers were told they have to check in every three weeks to make sure that that the charges aren't being pressed against.
SPEAKER_02So they're just kind of keeping it hanging over their head this entire time to intimidate people.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, if the misdemeanors are hanging over their head for a year, the felonies potentially three years. What it really is meant to do is intimidate everybody through pickets, and in particular, if after this sixty-day cooling off period the union goes back on strike to intimidate anyone who goes out there, they too could be arrested and potentially charged with felony charges just for pickets.
SPEAKER_02Right. I've seen quite a few of your reels on Instagram where you talk about the connection between the struggle of like the ILWU and the connection with the fight against C and H with the struggle in the Philippines. Would you be able to talk a little bit more about that?
SPEAKER_05Sure. I mean, from the beginning, the support of the Filipino community in the Bay Area has been fantastic. They have been on the picket lines both in Crockett and when we picketed Eleven Terminal and the ship the Thai Herald was tied up there. They were unloading sugar. They are they defend Negro's coalition has been formed. The fight for justice for the 19 people who were murdered by the Marcos government on the island of Negros Occidental. And they came very much linking the fact that some of the sugar in the Thai Herald that was promoted was from the island of Negros. And so they linked the struggle for justice for the sugar workers and peasants in Negros against the violence and massacre perpetrated by the Marcos government to the the fight of C and H at in Crockett. In fact, the sugar workers and Negros are one side of the supply chain. We're the other end. And we're united in the understanding that we have the same enemies. And in the end, it's the same fight. But the American government spends millions arming the Marcos government and expanding their Navy bases in the Philippines right now. They would they spend that that money, billions of dollars to do that. Well, all they offer us here at home are slashed wages, decreased medical benefits, mass homelessness, destruction of public education. And so the enemy is US imperialism, whether and the US imperialism once it backs to the Hilt, the sugar monopoly that owns CNH, just like they back to the Hilt, the Marcos government of the C.
SPEAKER_04And um local ten unanimously passed a motion, right? It's July meeting.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, they supported the struggle for Negros 19. Yes, we did pass that motion, and I understand just recently the International Executive Board has also passed a motion. The same motion to support the campaign for justice for the Negros 19. I uh should also note here that the ILWU has a special connection with the struggle in the Philippines because two of our union organizers were murdered in 1981, Jean Viarnes and Tume Domingo, who were organizing Filipino workers, cannery workers into the LWU in Alaska. And they were raised an attack in their office gone down in 1991. And eventually the struggle for justice for these two union leaders led directly to the Marcos government. And the jury found that there was a conspiracy going all the way from the some of the bureaucrats inside the cannery workers all the way to the Marcos government and to Marcos himself that was responsible for murdering these two brothers. Violence against leftists in the Philippines directly has spilled over in the past to uh unions in this country. And the LW is very familiar with that. Also, uh weren't two of the Negros nineteen from the Bay Area? Yes, Lyle Priolis was well known in the Bay Area Filipino community here, and members of the Defend Negros 19 coalition spoke very powerfully about him at the ILW local 10 meeting which I attended. Kai Sorum, I believe, was from Southern California. Not Northern California, but Lyle Priolis was from Northern California.
SPEAKER_04There's a lot of connections here to the struggle against imperialism. I saw in the video I referenced, Amy, the speaker for the PDC, made a point about the FanJul family behind the CNH sugar company and their history in Cuba. Um, so what's the connection with the strike and the triangulation of Cuba that's happening now by the imperialists?
SPEAKER_03CNH is owned by a larger conglomerate, uh ASR, and and that company is owned by the Fangul family, and they are former Cuban capitalists. They were one of the families that was expropriated by the Cuban Revolution, and they all used to have sugar operations down there. Uh, they're also very close with the Trump regime. They're well known for pushing for counterrevolution in Cuba to try and reclaim their holdings there, and they'd like Cuba to go back to being a source of raw sugar for them, just like the Philippines is today, um, or Hawaii was formerly before the sugar industry was pulled out of there. There's a direct connection there. They're trying to do the same thing all around the world, all up and down the supply chain, suppress labor activism in the Philippines to secure cheap raw materials, and then suppress the union where here in the US, where the sugar is being processed, and then crush a worker state, a Cuba, uh, to return that to open capitalist exploitation so that it can expand and secure even more cheap raw sugar. The connection there is very direct and through the actual individuals and families involved. It's not just an abstract question of the interests of the capitalist class as a whole being tied together, but directly in this case, it really draws together a whole lot of themes and and demonstrates them in one concrete example.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and also how how important it is to win this strike and this battle against CNH, because it's not just any kind of thing.
SPEAKER_05Well, there's been some research. There's been some articles lately about the the Fan Huhl family's links with Donald Trump. They they historically they've played both sides of the style Democrats and Republicans. But Pepe Fan Huhl, he's one of the main brothers, sponsored a 50 million fundraiser for Trump during the election campaign. They gave one million to MAGA. And under the Biden administration, the sugar from their plantations in the Dominican Republic had been barred from entering the United States because of the horrible treatment and conditions on the plantations in the Dominican Republic. Oh, I think a week after Trump was elected, the ban was lifted and sugar from the Central Romano Company in Dominican Republic, which is owned by ASR, was allowed into the United States.
SPEAKER_02There was a big United Front rally, so I'm kind of curious. I know when Letal was reading off those list of names, I didn't hear DSA. Max, you want to talk a little bit more about what DSA has been doing around the Crockett 10 case?
SPEAKER_04I think they had been on the picket lines.
SPEAKER_03East Bay DSA's involvement has been contradicted and I think shows the contradictions of DSA in general, both the good and the bad. So on the one hand, they have been involved for for quite some time, uh coming out to the picket lines and going out there and walking the picket. And also there was a fundraiser in July, um, which I went to, a number of others went to as well, uh, to build for the strike fund. They got um a bunch of local businesses to donate items for a raffle, which was very successful, and charge money at the door and raised some money. I'm not sure exactly how much was raised, but raised money for the strike fund. And they had some workers from local sticks speak, which was also really good to draw these connections. I don't know for sure, but I believe that it was the the Negros 19 activists getting involved that really popularized the situation more broadly among the left in the Bay Area. Because there's been also a total media blackout. The first weeks of the strike, there was no news whatsoever. You had to go on Facebook groups or Reddit threads or whatever. We first heard about it because a picketer was actually struck by a scab truck entering the plant while they were on the picket line, and then the scab got out of their truck and drew a gun.
SPEAKER_04God.
SPEAKER_03That was obviously really intimidating and scary, and that made the rounds, but it made the rounds just in like labor circles and discussion groups and things like that. So we thought it was something worth checking out. DSA more broadly got involved when the Filipino activists got involved. So going out to the picket line as individuals after the fundraiser, that was kind of the catalyst for a chat group to start on signal. So there were more uh DSAers uh sharing information. Uh there were a couple of retired members of the ILWU in that chat group who would feed in information and tell people when the union was calling for more reinforcements, and then they'd send the word out through the signal group and and people would mobilize and come and organize carpools and things like that. So that was all well and good. But the thing was that DSA as an organization didn't really get involved and didn't have an interest in providing socialist leadership to the struggle or involving the working class. We in the JBA see the role of socialists is actually to increase the consciousness of the The working class and draw these threads together and also expose how the pro-capitalist program of the union leadership is actually an obstacle to winning the strike. DSA leadership was not really interested in that. They wanted to act as supporters and cheerleaders for whatever the leadership was doing and not really challenge that or expose that. I mean, obviously you can't go to a picket line and just declare yourself the new leadership and say this is the way things should be done and we're going to dictate how this strike should be run. But it is important to make arguments and to actually motivate the case politically for why a different strategy is needed. And that's something that was really lacking from the DSA intervention. DSA has many, many members who are in unions in the Bay Area. And they were told to go, and many of them did show up to show solidarity, but none of them were mobilized to try and influence their unions. So a number of supporters, like Emily, went to Local 10 and got this motion passed in the executive board. That was extremely important. That also gave kind of an inspiration to other unions in the Bay Area to do similar, or you know, for activists within those union supporters to go and make the case to those workforces. And having the local 10 motion in hand was an incredibly powerful tool, which resulted in the BART workers ATU Local 1555 endorsing and retiree AFSME, local and others. But that wasn't done in DSA. So I drafted a motion to put forward to the general meeting before the court appearance to endorse the rally, to support the Crockett 10 to call to drop the charges, but also to direct the labor committee to encourage unionists within the DSA to take the local 10 motion and use that as a model to get motions passed in their locals to also mobilize for the Crockett 10. And the other part of the motion was to get one of the candidate running for mayor of Richmond, uh Claudia Jimenez, to write a letter to the DA protesting this arrest and demanding that they drop the charges. So these were two concrete actions that would have really mobilized DSA as a branch, as a collective, to first of all, go to the working class and actually make the case within the class and mobilize its members as workers. And then, second of all, to actually get one of these current city council members and potential mayor to actually take a stand in defense of these workers and activists and get them to drop the charges. There's a lot of talk about accountability for elected. And this was a concrete example of something we could have actually put that to the test and said, You want the East Bay DSA endorsement? You say you're campaigning as a socialist, take this action and go up against the DA on this vital question. And the steering committee member said, Oh, we already support the Crockett 10. The chapter's already behind this. This isn't controversial. You can make an announcement for the court appearance at the end of the meeting. And I said, Okay, fine. We really wanted to get support for this. A lot of times in the JBA, our interventions into the meetings are opposed by the leadership and they try and shut us out and silence us and censor us. So we really wanted to get this case out there and get support for it. So we said, this time we won't put forward the motion. We'll take the speaking time. They gave me like two or three minutes, and I gave an extended motivation for why it was important and why people would show up. And it was very well received. Everybody at the meeting really appreciated that intervention. A lot of people told me that they were going to be there. A lot of people told me that they were really glad that someone was organizing this. It was really good work. And it was also nice that JBA could get our name out there, putting something forward constructive, rather than criticizing the electoral strategy of the branch to actually, you know, for this concrete action.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. And so that was good. On the day, there were a couple of people in DSA t-shirts. There might have been more DSA members there that I don't know because it wasn't like an organized contingent. But I did think that that was a missed opportunity. The steering committee member kind of was prioritizing having a well-organized meeting where everything was going according to their plan, rather than actually having a political debate about something of real substance. Maybe there were people there who thinks that we shouldn't have taken this case into the unions and that you don't want to rock the boat with the union leadership. And then that would have been a really good argument to have out on the floor about why it's actually important to press for what's necessary for the working class in spite of your rotten union leadership and how to go about doing so, which is something we want people in DSA to be talking about. But yeah, that's not the way that it went this time. But again, it's not over, and we will continue to push with the DSA for DSA to take a real stand on this and draw a line between what is a socialist strategy to win this strike and what is just going along with the strategy of the union bureaucracy, which does not actually have a strategy to ultimately win this in spite of having taken some bold moves in the recent period.
SPEAKER_05I should add to that that DSA's politics in this regard is exactly the same politics of the international and local gun leadership politics, which is to rely on Democratic Party politicians and Adam Smith and the electeds to do something for working people. When our last contract was up in 2023, the union kept us working for almost a year and a half with no contract because the union leadership supported Biden Biden's election campaign. It didn't want to upset the Apple cart and make things tougher with Biden so that we didn't use the significant social power that longshore workers have to begin to turn things around for working people. And when we went back to work after accepting higher wages, it was just as uh the UAW and the Teamsters were maybe gonna go on strike. So the opportunity of a major class offensive back against the ruling class was lost. Similarly, here the I mean what we did on July twenty first in shutting down every port in Northern California and pouring out on those picket lines was exactly what we needed to do because the way you win a strike is by shutting down and denying CNH's ability to get profit. But almost immediately the union leadership pulled back and sent everybody back to work that night. So it was one shift. It's in only twenty-four hours that CNH was shut down. And that's not gonna win a strike. All the rest of the time the the pickets at at CNH during the five weeks, almost six weeks, were really straggly affairs with five or six people at most, and where the union ticket captains were instructed to tell people to let the scabs through. And that's not the way you win a strike. We really need to build mass pickets to shut CNH down, and this retreat after July twenty calls. And one of the things that the JBA could be doing in the DSA, as we're doing in the Union, is using this time to regroup our forces in preparation for a real battle that that may well take place after the September 30th cooling off period is over.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, no, I I absolutely agree with that. And I I think that's gonna be our work in the next period, next month, is to actually go to the labor committee and try to have out some of these political debates about like we all want to support the CNH workers, but how are we gonna do that? What differentiates us as a socialist organization from some do-gooder NGO types or something? What does Marxism have to say about this and how we should be engaging in this struggle? And for the 60-day cooling off period, I found out about that through the DSA signal group, and someone, uh retiree member of of ILW posted this and also a DSA member posted this announcement saying there was a 60-day cooling off period and promoting it as a victory. They said that CNH was stonewalling us before, but now they've been forced back to the bargaining table and they were refusing to bargain before. And so now this is a victory because now they've agreed to negotiate. I said, this is clearly a retreat. The picket lines have come down. It was the pickets were successful at actually preventing this ship from being unloaded. It was obviously really feeling the pinch. And this is giving up the strategic leverage that the union and its supporters have built in these past five weeks. And they're going to use this opportunity to unload the ship and get their profits going and re-arm. And the response was very, very angry and hostile, saying, How could you do this? Well, first of all, the workers voted for this, which, okay, fine. And that's a classic CSA argument. It's workers' democracy. How could you go against the will of the workers who voted for this cooling off period? They voted for that informed by a certain leadership. If your leadership is up there telling you our back is against the wall, we've gone as far as we can go, we're not going to win anymore, there's no strike fund. If you stay out striking any longer, it's just going to mean it's going to be harder to pay next month's rent. So here we've got this great deal, and it gives us a chance to make some money and regroup. And so you should all take it. This is a real hard-fought battle. Multiple picketers have been hit by cars. Uh, they they don't have uh a strike fund as far as I know, except maybe some small amounts of money.
SPEAKER_05There was no strike fund.
SPEAKER_03And so it's understandable that some people would vote for this if they don't think that there is a possibility of struggling for better under the current leadership. But the job of socialists is not to take that and say, oh, this is the will of the workers, but to actually show that actually a different way of struggling is possible. That when they're feeling it, when the boss is actually feeling the pinch, that's when you're at your most powerful. It's not when you fold up and go back to work. That's when you actually gather your forces for a decisive blow. I think that's a political fight that needs to be had in DSA. What is the way forward and what can we be doing to actually raise the consciousness? And the left within DSA, there are a lot of people in DSA who do have criticisms of the current union leadership and how they run things. You make criticisms of the trade union bureaucracy, you'll get a lot of nods of agreement at any given DSA meeting. But then translating that into action to actually putting forward a strategy to expose them in action and point for a different way forward, that's something that's not being done that we in the JBA want the to push DSA into doing.
SPEAKER_05Local six workers were fired by CNH for their actions on the picket line, and the union agreed to go back to work without them getting their jobs back. Wow. Some victory. I mean there was opposition inside the union to that. But when the leadership is telling you there's no other way forward and maybe they're gonna lock you out if you don't accept what's going on period, which is evidently what they said, then they went ahead with it. But it just kicked the can down the road. Yeah. Because there's no reason to believe ASR is gonna give up without their pound of flesh, as I said at this rally at the courthouse.
SPEAKER_03It's really a fight worth having because there was a lot of resonance for our intervention to support the the CNH strike and to defend the Crockett 10. There were a lot of people in the in the East Bay DSA who really were for it. And it just shows that there's people in there who really see themselves as socialists who see themselves as partisans of the working class and and want to fight on behalf of the unions, and it's just a matter of of how to do it. And at the rally, I had this exchange with an internationalist group member who was denouncing us, saying you guys are in the Democratic Party, the Democrats are a capitalist party, therefore you're in a capitalist party, therefore you're in a popular front, and this is a real betrayal of socialism. And I was saying, you don't know anything about what it's like inside DSA. There's all sorts of different tendencies, there's all sorts of different people who have different programs and ideas of what socialism is. The the really rotten block is around the support of the Democratic Party. And that's the key thing that really needs to be overcome. And so that's what we're actually trying to do. And he said, we do that from the outside. And you guys, by being in the DSA, because you're a part of the Democratic Party and yet you're arguing for a break with the Democratic Party, that makes you dirty breakers. And I said, man, that just really shows how you're unable to make an effective argument that's going to win over DSA members because that's not what the term dirty break means. Like these words have meaning, these terms have meanings. And if you want to convince someone, you actually have to take up their political arguments and make a convincing case based on the actual terms of debate, not based on some made-up terminology in your head. You've decided that dirty break means this. And so therefore you're just going to throw it around as an insult. That's just sectarianism, like thinking that like you can define the terms of debate and kind of force them on the world rather than taking the world as it is and saying, okay, where are the cracks here? Where are the contradictions? Where's the actual decent impulse that can be spoken to or expanded on or motivated? And that's what we're trying to do.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think that you laid that out pretty well. If when you do work in the DSA, you know that there's there are a lot of these contradictions. And there's a lot of people that join because they think it's the biggest socialist organization and want to be part of that. And actually to not be in there fighting to break the Democratic Party chain, that's actually an abdication as socialists to fight for that. This thing, like, oh, you guys are like anyone in the DSA, like it's very clear to everyone at the DSA what our purpose is and what we're trying to do. And there's a lot of opposition to that. But to just scream from outside, it you're actually not going to do it as a Democrats. Yeah, you're not actually going to break the popular front if that's what you claim to be for. What is being discussed in the DSA nationally in this next period is um AOC and endorsing AOC, which again is controversial inside the DSA. How does that really intersect this question that we're talking about with the class struggle perspective versus Democratic Party electoralism, which is really what the right wing pushes, but the left really capitulates to as well by not really challenging it either? AOC notoriously spiked the rail strike a few years ago.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_04It's actually incompatible with a class struggle strategy, obviously, to support these Democrats. I think there was discussion in the East Bay DSA on this question. How do you actually support the working class and take a side with them and at the same time be associated with these strikebreakers?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, this struggle at CNH is a real breath of fresh air, that there's actually been some real solidarity there. Actually, on July 21st, a mobilization that actually mobilized to shut down the plant. And these are our positive developments that we want to point to. This is how to actually build the power of the working class and fight for socialism is to support the workers in these struggles. If you're telling workers that the way to fight for socialism is to endorse a proven strike breaker, that is only going to alienate the working class from the socialists. I mean, I think that like this in action showing the the the Crockett 10 themselves, you know, half of them are union members, half of them are socialists, uh, you know, kind of the unity on the picket line, if that was a really good thing, and we want to see more of that. And that's the kind of action that can actually overcome these divisions, is socialists actually proving in action their ability to stand with the working class and also programmatically what they have to bring to the table in terms of strategy. And if you're telling workers that socialism means backing the lesser evil or backing AOC, who's just like the kind of worst combination of like crass, like liberal kind of ladder climbing, and then also promotes all this kind of well, used to and is kind of distancing yourself from this kind of identity politics, blaming the backwards working class for the ills of the country. That's just really going to drive a wedge between the working people and the socialist movement. And so that's what what I argued. We went, supporters of JBA went to this general meeting last Sunday and we participated in these breakout groups. And those are the points we made. We should be endorsing independent socialist candidates. We should actually be building up our links to the working class, and supporting Democrats actually drives a wedge between us and the working class. And if we do manage to dupe some working class supporters into following us, then we're taking their faith and their confidence in us and we're channeling it back into a capitalist party. It's not going to build DSA, it's going to build the capitalist Democrats. I made those arguments, and comrades in the JBA made those arguments in other groups. And then when it came time to report back from the discussions into the general meeting, the moderators of our breakout groups, not a single one of them reported any of our clean break arguments back into the general discussion. And all of us got some level of resonance within our group. We were the ones out in front making the explicit clean break arguments. But in every one of our breakout groups, there were some number of people who agreed with us or thought we had good points or came up and spoke with us afterwards and exchanged numbers with us. This does reflect there are others who have similar views or who are sympathetic to this view with the DSA, and yet the leadership clearly manufactured the discussion to silence any kind of opposition. And it's very clear they're just trying to condition the general discussion to eventually endorse AOC. I think everybody understands that's the project of the right wing of the DSA, and the left wing of the DSA is either going along with it or actively supporting it. And yet they know that AOC is generally unpopular, even among the DSA.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_03There's a lot of anger at her. So they have to kind of stage this discussion where they narrow the terms of the debate and narrow the voices that get heard so that they can create this consensus going into these next presidential elections. And we're going to fight it every step of the way, but we got an uphill battle against the leadership that's trying to trying to push this on us.
SPEAKER_04Just to wrap up here, where's the struggle right now? How can listeners and those of us fighting for a class struggle, independent socialist politics in the SA, how can we support the struggle right now?
SPEAKER_05That remained the point where I spoke at the rally that outside the courthouse, that the struggle to defend the LWU begins with the Crockett 10 in defense of the Crockett 10. But it doesn't end there. And that in fact we should be using our resources in the LWU and in the left in general to regroup and prepare for what may well be an intensification of the battle when the cooling off period ends September 30th. I think that continuing to argue for the defense of those three workers who were fired and local fixed has to be made and has to be made strongly and that the need next time to build mass picket lines. That's the whole idea of the whole conception of a picket line and what it means has been eroded in the labor movement. So most bureaucrats portray it as a public relations gimmick rather than an actual battle line that you have to close down the facility and deny them profits or they start you out. And that we need to fight to reassert what picket lines need and beware the policy that says all we can do is rely on Democratic Party politicians. No, but working people have their own organization, their own solidarity. And that's independence. That independent mobilization of working class power is what can win this strike.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. For our part of DSA, it's to actually try and push DSA to mobilize its working class, its union members as unionists and get their co-workers to actually come and show up and support this and actually put forward a counterpose strategy to the current leadership and and their reliance on uh the Democratic Party and the legal system and compromise and give backs as their methods and actually put forward a class struggle strategy in opposition to that. I think that there's going to be plenty of opportunities to prepare and gather our forces. So let's have that debate. And rather than just seeing ourselves as individual do-gooders who show up when the union leaders tell us to show up, seeing ourselves as active elements trying to be socialist leaders of the class that are actually pushing it into a direction of uh that that can win.
SPEAKER_04Great. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us. Emily, if you have to have social media that people can check out to find out updates and what's happening.
SPEAKER_05I have my own personal Instagram, Emily Turnbull Local10. Great, okay. For people who want to check out that we'll be posting updates on the struggle, certainly, if we go back out. And there's videos on there, right? From there are videos that I posted of me speaking and and videos about the event, the rally outside the courthouse.
SPEAKER_02That concludes this episode of Give Me a Break. You can follow JBA at Clean Break Now on X and at DSA underscore just break already on Instagram. We also have a link tree, which is linktree.com slash DSA underscore just break already, where you can find all of our petitions, statements, resolutions, and everything else we've been up to lately. We recently published a joint statement with International Socialist Alternative Revolutionary centered on the debate in DSA LA over endorsing Zionist Democrat Nitya Rahman for mayor, which is really good. You should read it if you haven't already, and you can find that at our link tree and on all of our social media. As always, we welcome your comments, criticism, love letters, and hate mail. We'd love to have people on from the other DSA caucuses to debate on how to go forward. Like I tease last week, we are planning at some point in the future to have a debate on the question of the Green Party, and we would like to have many, many more debates as well. So hit us up. Our DMs are always open.
SPEAKER_06Hey.
SPEAKER_02Till next week.
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