United Public Workers for Action

3 days ago

As workplace surveillance grows, experts say it’s good to know the ways your employer is watching
www.eastbaytimes.com/2026/08/21/as-workplace-surveillance-grows-experts-say-its-good-to-know-the-…

By ASSOCIATED PRESS | Associated Press
PUBLISHED: August 21, 2026 at 9:43 AM PDT | UPDATED: August 21, 2026 at 10:04 AM PDT

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK — College administrators read an adjunct professor’s comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.

Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during the coronavirus pandemic. A vast array of digital tools still are being used to track locations, collect data on task completion rates, and access work-issued smartphone and laptop cameras, raising concerns about how much privacy employees have relinquished, even in their own homes.

Employers have always monitored workers, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science enable them to create extensive data sets or “dossiers” that can be used to punish workers or attempt to predict employee behavior, said Wilneida Negrón, director of research and policy at Coworker, a nonprofit that helps workers organize to improve working conditions.

Meghan Markle Reportedly No Longer Part Of Guy Ritchie's Netflix Series 'The Gentlemen', Casting Doubts On Acting Comeback

“Oftentimes, the workers with the least amount of power in the labor markets tend to be testing grounds for some of the more intrusive forms of data collection,” Negrón said.

Some of the most common workplace monitoring programs have shared names, email addresses and other personal worker data with hundreds of outside data brokers and technology companies without clearly disclosing the practice, according to an investigation by Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Data privacy experts and workers who say they’ve been closely monitored spoke with The Associated Press about what they see as the risks of employer surveillance and the steps employees can take to protect their personal information.

Team up with like-minded colleagues to advocate for yourself

Pharmacist Lannie Duong’s job at a medical clinic involved meeting with patients who had chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. She reviewed their medical histories, blood work and symptoms, and adjusted their medications. She frequently enlisted interpreters to help her communicate with patients who had limited English language skills.

Duong said her employer tracked the length of her phone calls and appointments, and in performance evaluations questioned why she took so long with each patient.

“Everything was counted. How many minutes you’re on the phone. The minutiae of it was ridiculous,” Duong said. “We’re just tasked to do what feels like the impossible.”

Under what she described as unrelenting pressure, Duong felt “not trusted, not appreciated, almost completely hopeless. It was so depressing.” She eventually went on medical leave and began volunteering with other pharmacists to organize a union.

“I spoke up, hoping others would voice their concerns as well, but that didn’t really pan out,” Duong said. She says her employment was terminated after the medical leave.

Many of the employers using surveillance tools do so transparently and engage employee boards in reviewing how the tools are used, Negrón said. But there are also employers tracking, ranking and scoring employees in ways that are not transparent to workers, she said.

“Workers are going to have to come together because the forces of centralizing this kind of tracking and monitoring are moving too fast,” Negrón said.

Find out what kind of data your employer is collecting about you

As awareness about surveillance tools grows, some workers are pushing back on tools that track how long it takes to fulfill tasks, saying such monitoring contributes to injuries, and questioning what personal information is being collected and how it’s being used, said Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital privacy.

“Unfortunately, if you are on a machine that’s been issued by your workplace, you should expect that there’s some type of monitoring,” Tsukayama said.

Researching data collection and surveillance trends in your industry is a good idea, according to Negrón. Without that knowledge, workers may find themselves unprepared when confronted with information unearthed during surveillance.

While teaching a college writing class, Arianna Anaya discovered that an administrator was reading the papers her students uploaded to the school’s learning management software and the comments Anaya made on the work. The students often wrote about intimate topics, including abuse, eating disorders and family trauma.

“The school essentially used the online learning system to allow administrators and staff to read student work that was often immensely private and personal, something we were specifically told students should not know about,” Anaya said.

A colleague who printed out the comments criticized the casual tone Anaya used with students and accused her of not sticking to the course syllabus. A few months later, Anaya’s teaching contract wasn’t renewed, although she doesn’t know the exact reason.

“It made me quite paranoid,” Anaya said. “It made me feel less safe in the world.”

Check state laws to see what’s required of employers

Some states, including New York, Connecticut, Delaware and Maine, require employers to notify workers if they’re being monitored. Maine’s law goes further, prohibiting visual monitoring in employees’ homes or personal vehicles unless that kind of observation is required for the duties of the job, said Edward Halle, a privacy and AI compliance manager.

“The question becomes, what does the law mean by ‘the duties of the job’?” Halle said. “A telehealth nurse needs a camera; the camera is the job. A productivity webcam bolted onto ordinary desk work almost certainly isn’t. Where that line falls is the first thing the Department of Labor will be asked to sort out.”

If you work in a state without a notification requirement, it’s difficult to find out if an employer is using technology to monitor your performance.

To raise the issue with managers, Tsukayama suggests coordinating with a union. If that’s not an option and you’re asking managers individually, approach the topic cautiously and take a curious tone, she advised. You could say you’ve noticed something on the computer and have questions, such as “How is this information being used within the company? How might it get out of the company?” Tsukayama said.

One place to start is asking what specific employee data your organization collects, said Aiha Nguyen, director of the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society, a nonprofit institute studying the impacts of technology. If your manager doesn’t know, the information technology department may have answers, since the people working there often are the ones turning on the features, Nguyen said.

Some common software programs such as Microsoft Office and Zoom have tools that can be used for tracking worker productivity, but the tracking features aren’t always activated. Knowing whether those tracking features are turned on can be difficult, because they’re built into the programs, Nguyen said.

“It’s automatic. It’s considered something that employers have been able to say, ‘This is necessary for work. You have to use these tools,’” she said.

To help safeguard personal information, don’t use work devices to handle family matters or sensitive personal information such as medical conditions, experts advise.

“I think most people know that,” Nguyen said. “But it can become tedious to switch between phones, or people don’t really think it’s that harmful. … You don’t want to potentially put yourself at risk.” … See MoreSee Less

As workplace surveillance grows, experts say it’s good to know the ways your employer is watching

www.eastbaytimes.com

Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during the coronavirus pandemic.

United Public Workers for Action

5 days ago

California shouldn’t let oil companies rewrite refinery safety rules
calmatters.org/commentary/2026/01/refinery-safety-rules-california-oil/
JANUARY 14, 2026
BY MARIE CHOI AND NICK PLURKOWSKI
A large oil refinery is illuminated against the backdrop of a twilight sky. Tall distillation towers with staircases and platforms rise into the air, with numerous lights glowing across the industrial structure. A plume of black smoke drifts from one of the stacks, contrasting with the warm hues of the sunset. Metal pipes, walkways, and scaffolding weave throughout the refinery, creating a dense, industrial landscape.
An oil refinery in Carson on May 29, 2024. Photo by Damian Dovarganes, AP Photo
Welcome to CalMatters, the only nonprofit newsroom devoted solely to covering statewide issues that affect all Californians. Sign up for WeeklyMatters for a Saturday morning digest of the latest news and commentary from the Golden State.
This story is part of California Voices, a commentary forum aiming to broaden our understanding of the state and spotlight Californians directly impacted by policy or its absence. Learn more here.
Nick Plurkowski is president of United Steelworkers Local 5, representing workers at three Bay Area refineries
In recent months, a string of refinery fires, chemical releases and other disasters has put Californians on edge. Yet California regulators are quietly proposing to weaken the state’s safety rules in a secret deal with oil lobbyists — putting us all at greater risk.

On Jan. 15, regulators will hold a public hearing at the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board meeting in Sacramento on changes to California’s Process Safety Management regulations, an issue with life-or-death consequences for workers and nearby communities.

These regulations exist to keep people safe. After the 2012 Chevron refinery explosion in Richmond sent a massive fireball into the sky and sent thousands of residents to seek medical help, California strengthened its refinery safety rules.

The reforms established crucial safeguards: rigorous oversight of hazardous materials and processes, common-sense standards ensuring meaningful worker participation in safety processes and engineering reviews, and authority for workers to stop unsafe operations.

We represent communities living next to refineries and the workers who operate them. Together, we are sounding the alarm — California must not allow oil billionaires and their lobbyists to rewrite refinery safety rules.

Recent disasters at refineries across California — including major fires and explosions inMartinez, Benicia and El Segundo in 2025 alone — show that the risks remain serious and urgent.

As oil executives disinvest from maintenance at aging refineries, the risk of deadly disasters increases, making these regulations more important than ever.

Refinery disasters don’t just affect workers and local communities. They impact Californians across the state when we fill up our tanks. Major accidents often disrupt fuel supplies, driving up gasoline prices.

The proposed OSHA changes stem from a settlement between state regulators and oil industry lobbyists — a secret deal crafted behind closed doors, excluding workers and frontline communities. The changes would erode critical safety protections and give oil companies more control over the rules meant to hold them accountable.

The most dangerous change targets a crucial aspect of refinery safety, employee participation.

The proposal would allow oil executives to handpick workers to participate in developing safety plans and conducting critical safety reviews. In practice, that means a worker who raises concerns about corroded pipes or unsafe chemical levels could be replaced with someone more willing to stay silent.

This defies common sense. Refinery workers are responsible for the day-to-day operation and maintenance of these facilities.

They know which metals are used in each process and how much acid or additives can be used. They know which chemicals corrode and rip holes through pipes. Their knowledge is essential to preventing disasters.

Other revisions would reduce oversight of hazardous chemicals, narrowing what companies are required to analyze and fix.

These dangerous and carcinogenic substances don’t disappear just because we decide to look the other way. They remain on-site, threatening workers and surrounding neighborhoods.

Communities like Richmond and Carson are already deeply impacted by day-to-day refinery pollution. They experience elevated rates of asthma, cancer and other chronic illnesses. Explosions and toxic accidents exacerbate these risks.

The existing safety rules were built with worker input for a reason. Refinery workers want safe jobs. Refineries are inherently hazardous, and a single failure can mean severe injury or death. Workers must be able to select their own representatives who understand refining processes, prioritize environmental health and safety and who will not cave to corporate pressure.

Luckily, this deal can still be stopped. Governor Newsom’s regulators should reject these industry-driven rollbacks and work openly with workers and residents.

The future of safety at California’s refineries should be defined by public voices — not oil billionaires and their lobbyists. … See MoreSee Less

Opinion | California shouldn't let oil companies rewrite refinery safety rules

calmatters.org

Regulators will hold a hearing Jan. 15 at the OSHA Standards Board in Sacramento on changes that will weaken safety standards for refineries.

United Public Workers for Action

5 days ago

The long shadow of Argentina’s dictatorship: she wasn’t who she thought she was – neither was her father
A young activist thought her father’s disapproval of her leftwing views was purely political. Then one evening, a kiss goodbye sent her on a remarkable journey that continues today
www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/20/long-shadow-argentinas-dictatorship-she-was-not-who-she-thou…
By Meaghan Beatley
Thu 20 Aug 2026 00.00 EDT

As a child, Analía Azic used to pretend she was secretly a princess, the heiress to a magical distant kingdom. In real life, she was the daughter of a greengrocer named Juan Antonio Azic and a demure housewife named Esther Abrego. The family lived in the province of Buenos Aires, which, as anyone from the area will tell you with a dash of pride, is not the city of Buenos Aires but its rougher neighbour. Analía was not royalty, but she had an iron will and audacity out of proportion to her small stature.

Analía cared little for grades at the Ladies Institute of the Sacred Heart, where she rolled with the dominantes, girls who hiked their school skirts up so high they served as little more than belts, and dreamed of the weekend when they could finally trade in their school uniforms for designer jeans and tight tank tops and sashay into Electric Circus, the one local club that allowed in minors. There, Analía would climb atop the speakers and dance, then leap back down to toy with the boys from the Argentine air force’s technical trade school.

It was the 1990s and she and her friends were middle-class kids from families with ties to the armed forces. Their understanding of recent events was that the nation had emerged, in the previous decade, from a “dirty war” between two opposing forces of equal strength. On the one side, a national army fighting for the preservation of Christian values and the fatherland; on the other, unscrupulous Marxist guerrillas advocating their overthrow. Both sides had committed crimes, that was true – but it was war, and thankfully the army had won and reinstated order. Analía absorbed this narrative both at school and at home, where her father, Juan Antonio, railed against what he called the “atheist, unpatriotic left”.

From the age of nine, Analía had taken to reading the newspaper after her father had finished with it, and at night would sidle up beside him to watch his political programmes on TV. This bonded her to her father, as surely as it unsettled her mother. Esther believed that politics, like climbing trees, was not becoming of the female sex. Analía – who, by her own admission, possessed a “rebellious, contentious nature” – ignored her. But it was precisely this defiant streak that soon led her to question her parents’ politics. When Analía turned 15, she got her hands on Che Guevara’s complete works. She started to become curious about leftwing ideas.

This was a period of relative calm and prosperity in Argentina, following decades marred by chaos and military dictatorships. Carlos Menem, the nation’s president for most of the 1990s, was a flashy, spray-tanned bon vivant with a penchant for posing by his Ferrari for magazine spreads. Though a Peronist – a member of the dominant leftist party in Argentina, named after its founder, Juan Domingo Perón – he ushered in a Washington-approved, free-market liberalisation programme that included privatising more than 400 state-run companies and effectively dismantling the welfare state. In the short term, his programme seemed to offer relief, especially to middle-class Argentines, who splurged on imported goods and holidays in Miami. But in the long term, it devastated many domestic industries and helped set the country careening toward a debt crisis.

Analía had seen spiralling poverty first-hand through volunteer work with church groups. After she read Guevara, these impressions took on a new political dimension in her mind. He embodied the Latin American guerrillas of the 1960s and 70s she had been taught to revile. But now she wondered: if they’d been fighting to ease inequality in one of the most unequal regions in the world, hadn’t they been right?

After finishing the book, Analía promptly bought a beret; from then on she took it off only to sleep and shower. She tacked a poster of Guevara’s face to her bedroom door. Her father did not tear it down, as she expected, but, with patient resignation, asked her to put it on the inside of the door.

“As I continued to oppose the rightwing discourse of my family, an ideological rift opened up between us that grew even wider,” she later reflected. At the time, she saw it as “simply the result of the fact that he was old and I was young”. Later, she would come to see it very differently.

If Analía’s politics began as teenage rebellion, by the time she went to university they solidified into conviction. She agreed to study law at the University of Buenos Aires after Juan Antonio shot down her first choice, sociology. (The department was a “nest of leftists”, he told her.) But it was at university that she joined the political organisation that would define her life.

Venceremos (We will overcome) was the student arm of a self-styled nationalist and revolutionary movement called Patria Libre, which opposed the government’s free-market reforms. As the century ended and Argentinaslid deeper into an economic crisis, the government implemented harsh austerity measures. Analía, who was still living at home, threw herself into increasingly rowdy protests with Venceremos, while telling her parents that she was going to the movies or volunteering with church groups.

The lies weighed on her. One night in 1999, while watching the evening news with her parents, Analía saw one of her fellow activists on screen, hurling a rock through a shop window. “I’m involved with that group,” she blurted out. “That’s where I spend my days. Not in church.” Esther froze. Juan Antonio just stared at her, with what Analía would later think looked more like fear than anger. “My relationship with my parents, and [Juan Antonio] especially, deteriorated from the moment I stopped lying,” she later wrote.

An anti-government rally in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in March 1982.
View image in fullscreen
An anti-government rally in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in March 1982.Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images
On 1 December 2001, the government imposed a freeze on bank accounts, blocking Argentines’ access to their savings. People started rioting. Analía dodged blows from the police as she fled the centre of the capital after a protest, her high heels clacking against the pavement (she’d planned on going dancing afterwards). The riots raged on for weeks, peaking on 19 and 20 December, when police opened fire on protesters, killing 39.

The months immediately after the December 2001 financial collapse were some of the darkest in recent Argentine history. Unemployment soared, and half the population fell below the poverty line. Analía helped set up soup kitchens and communal vegetable gardens to feed the homeless and unemployed, and offered literacy classes and legal advice. She lived in an abandoned bank that had been converted into a cultural centre, with no hot water. Concerned about her health, her parents insisted she come home at least once a week for a home-cooked meal.

It was at one of these weekly dinners, one Thursday night in July 2003, that Analía’s life was upended.

After the fall of Argentina’s last military dictatorship in 1983, the country initially seemed to offer the world a rare model of effective transitional justice. In 1985, nine junta commanders were tried in what became the first major war crimes trial since Nuremberg. The prosecution drew heavily from Nunca Más (Never again), a 1984 report compiled by Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which documented 8,960 cases of forced disappearance, as well as other atrocities. The court convicted five of the nine defendants for “implementing a criminal plan” that included torturing and murdering Argentines. But just two years later, as a new wave of trials targeting middle-ranking officers approached, a faction of the military launched a mutiny, demanding an end to prosecutions for crimes committed during the dictatorship.

To quell the unrest, President Raúl Alfonsín passed two laws. The first, known as the Full Stop law, set a deadline of 60 days for any new prosecutions for political violence. The second, the Due Obedience law, granted immunity to lower-ranking officers on the grounds that they were following orders when they committed crimes. Many Argentines simply called them the “impunity laws”. They meant that a decade after the dictatorship had ended, you could find yourself standing in line at the grocery store behind the very man who had tortured you.

Following the 2001 financial crisis, many leftwing organisations demanded the repeal of the impunity laws, and for official recognition of 30,000 as the number of disappeared – far above the 8,960 cases documented in the 1984 Nunca Más report, which counted only those confirmed missing at the time. In the absence of legal mechanisms by which to hold people suspected of war crimes accountable, protesters would stand in front of their homes or workplaces and call them out for their alleged crimes, in a kind of public shaming. Analía was one of the participants in these protests, which were known as escraches.

About 10pm on 24 July 2003, Analía was at her parents’ house for one of their weekly dinners when her father emerged from his bedroom impeccably dressed. He asked Analía to stay at home that evening and then left, “without any explanation, although he kissed … us goodbye”, Analía recalled, adding that it was “a surprising display of affection”.

A few hours later, the phone rang. Analía picked up. It was her father, sounding odd. He dictated a number for Analía to take down and instructed her to call it in an hour. When she did so, a male voice answered. “Analía, is that you?” the man said. “Your father’s in the hospital. He just shot himself.”

At the hospital, Analía found her father “unconscious and without a face”. The bullet hadn’t damaged his brain but it had completely disfigured him. Reeling, she stepped out of his room and walked down to the waiting area. That’s when she saw a list of names in bright red letters scrolling across a TV screen. They belonged to about 40 members of the Argentine military who had served under the junta and who were facing extradition to Spain to stand trial for dictatorship-era crimes. Juan Antonio Azic, her father, was on the list. (The trials were due to take place in Spain thanks to the efforts of the crusading judge Baltasar Garzón acting under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which allowed courts of one country to prosecute grave human rights crimes committed outside that country.)

Analía had known her father had been in the military, but she’d always assumed he’d simply done his service as required by law. Now she learned he had belonged to a taskforce that kidnapped, tortured and disappeared people in the Esma, a navy mechanics’ school that had been converted into one of the largest and deadliest clandestine detention centres right in the heart of Buenos Aires. An estimated 5,000 people were held there throughout the dictatorship. The man who raised her, she discovered, had wielded an electric cattle prod against prisoners to get them to speak. “My father had suddenly ceased to be an innocent fruit-and-vegetable merchant and had become one of the people whose imprisonment I had been demanding for years,” she said.

A mural featuring the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 2023. Photograph: Víctor R Caivano/AP
She contacted the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a celebrated human rights group fighting dictatorship-era impunity, with whom Analía had campaigned. She asked to speak to their head, Estela de Carlotto, an elegant matriarch with a halo of white hair. “I told her that I needed to apologise, because I had found out my father was a torturer, but that I also needed to hear that I still had the right to be politically active, that my genetic heredity did not automatically make me ineligible to keep fighting for the causes I believed in.” Estela arranged for them to meet. It was only later that Analía, who had been sobbing on the call, would think Estela had sounded strangely serene.

A few days later, Analía walked into a bar to meet Estela and several other members of human rights organisations. They informed her they had reason to believe she was not Juan Antonio and Esther’s natural daughter, and suggested she have a DNA test. Rather than being the child of a war criminal, they had strong evidence that Analía might be the daughter of a couple of leftist dissidents disappeared by the junta.

Across Latin America, just as elsewhere, the 1960s was a decade of revolution. In Argentina, a string of coups and one general’s prohibition of Peronism – more than a political party, the working man’s creed – contributed to the rapid radicalisation of Argentine youth. Some turned to armed struggle.

The two most prominent guerrilla organisations were the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Marxist-Leninist outfit, and the Peronist Montoneros. These groups raided police stations and army barracks for weapons, robbed banks to fund their operations, and kidnapped military officers and business executives, sometimes for ransom, sometimes to execute them.

On 24 March 1976, a military junta seized power in a coup and began dismantling any leftist opposition. By then, the Montoneros were weak, but they were labelled terrorists and targeted by the new regime, along with students, labour and trade unionists, intellectuals and anyone suspected of leftwing opposition.

The guerrillas went underground. Among them were a couple in the Montoneros, María Hilda Pérez, known as Cori, and José María Donda, known as El Cabo, or Captain. Cori was passionate and impulsive. When her father told her to remove a cache of weapons she’d stashed in his house, she shoved them into an enormous duffel bag and hauled it down the street yelling, “Cowards!” back at her gawking sisters. José was quiet and commanding. He quickly ascended to a key position within the Montoneros.

Cori and José’s love for Peronism, which they saw as a liberating force in Argentina, was matched only by their love for each other, and they married in a small ceremony in 1973 when she was 22 and he 19. Their witness was José’s older brother, Adolfo Donda, a career navy officer 10 years his senior whom José had idolised as a kid, even as their divergent politics opened a rift between them.

It was Adolfo who, as a senior intelligence officer inside the junta, laid a trap for Cori and had her arrested in March 1977, when she was five months pregnant. When José learned of it, he told a neighbour he believed Adolfo had set her up to get to him. José himself was captured that May. Years later, a man who’d survived imprisonment in the Esma and crossed paths with Adolfo there testified to overhearing him say: “This is a war. And in a war you can’t show mercy to your enemy. I didn’t show mercy to my own brother, who was a Montonero. And I didn’t show mercy to my sister-in-law.”

To avoid the bad press that had haunted Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile with their firing squads – loud and flashy affairs that received international condemnation – the junta turned to another mode of extermination, the “death flight”. This consisted of injecting prisoners with a sleep-inducing narcotic, tying rocks to their feet, loading them into a small plane, and tossing them out, midair, into the River Plate or the Atlantic.

In April 1977, a group of 14 women gathered on the Plaza de Mayo before the Casa Rosada, the squat, rose-coloured presidential palace, demanding information on their missing children. Within weeks, the ranks of what became known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo had swelled to more than 100. Six months later, a few, soon to be called the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, asked another question. Where were the children of their missing pregnant daughters? Rumours churned that pregnant women who had been captured were kept alive long enough to deliver their children, only to have them taken away and handed off for adoption, often to regime sympathisers.

After she was arrested in March 1977, Cori was held prisoner in the Esma. She gave birth on a wooden table in a small room in the attic sometime between July and September 1977. The baby was her second child; the first, a two-year-old girl, was in her grandmother’s care at the time. Cori was told to write a letter to her family asking them to take care of this new baby, too. Suspecting neither the letter nor the child would ever actually reach them, she hatched a plan with her cellmate, a 19-year-old woman named Lidia Vieyra who’d been pulled in to act as midwife, despite having never done so before. With a needle and bits of blue surgical thread left over from the birth, they sewed tiny blue loops around the baby’s earlobes. Cori hoped that one day, if she were freed, somebody would remember the baby with little blue hoops in her ears, and the sign would help her trace the child.

Fifteen days after giving birth, the baby was taken from her, and according to testimony from survivors of the Esma, Cori was “transferred”. “Transfer” was the euphemism the military used to refer to the death flight. Her brother-in-law, Adolfo, was part of the detention centre’s leadership that decided on each week’s “transfers”. The circumstances around José’s disappearance are unclear.

Lidia Vieyra, Cori’s former cellmate, survived. After she got out in July 1978, she sought out the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to tell them about Cori’s missing baby. Over the next few decades, a series of tips slowly brought them closer to finding the child’s new identity and whereabouts. One came from someone who questioned whether their previously childless neighbours, Juan Antonio Azic and Esther Abrego, were really the parents of the baby who had suddenly appeared in their home. And another came from the wife of a junior coast guard officer who said that in 1977, shortly after she’d given birth to a son of her own, a commanding officer from the Esma handed her a baby girl, less than a month old, asking her to nurse her. When she took the baby, she noticed something unusual. Bits of blue thread sewn through her ears, like tiny blue hoops.

Vieyra had one final piece of information. Before she died, Cori had given the baby a name. She’d called her Victoria.

An estimated 500 babies were stolen during the dictatorship and, as part of a systematic plan, handed to military families or junta sympathisers who passed them off as their own. Couples who wanted a child joined waiting lists at military hospitals. Now Analía Azic had reason to believe that she was one of the stolen children.

On top of her grief and confusion, she was saddled with an enormous responsibility. Taking the DNA test and confirming Juan Antonio Azic and Esther Abrego were not her biological parents might mean putting them behind bars. She was convinced that Juan Antonio, who had been working at the Esma when Cori gave birth in custody, had kept his wife in the dark about their new baby’s origins, and that Esther, an obedient and timid wife, had simply never asked. Harder still was reconciling her feelings for Juan Antonio himself. She described him as a stern but loving father, and “the most important man in my life”.

It wasn’t until nearly a year later, on 24 March 2004, that Analía finally decided to take the test. She got her results in October. There was a 99.99% chance she was related to Cori and José María Donda. By this point, she can’t have been surprised. She had been shown a passport-sized photo of Cori. With the hooded eyes that conveyed both defiance and teenage ennui, jet-black hair falling at her temple, full lips and a strong chin – Cori was her spitting image.

Analía changed her name to Victoria Donda, the name her mother gave her at birth, and her father’s surname. This was shortly after the election of a Peronist candidate named Néstor Kirchner, whose presidency inaugurated a new era of accountability for dictatorship-era crimes. He struck down the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, putting an end to protection for those guilty of human rights abuses, and annulled a decree prohibiting the extradition of Argentines accused of torture and murder during the dictatorship.

In this new climate, Victoria became well known in Argentina as a child found by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. She wasn’t comfortable with the attention at first, though she later came to see it in a more positive light. “It’s a good thing for society to know what happened,” she said. “Argentina was a country where the dictatorship was not talked about.”

The one person who knew the most about her origins – her biological uncle, Adolfo Donda, the naval officer who had been in the leadership group that ordered her mother Cori’s “transfer” – had still not spoken.

Adolfo Donda had been first arrested in 1987 but was released after just four months. It was around the time the impunity laws were passed. For more than a decade, he faced no further legal consequences. That changed in 2003, when the impunity laws were repealed and he was arrested again. In 2011 and 2017, he would finally be convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a battery of crimes including kidnapping, torture and murder. But not Victoria’s abduction.

Victoria’s new identity deepened her commitment to leftist politics. “I’d always been a woman of the left, but to find out that this was in line with my parents, that it was the first thing I’d shared with them, that gave me another impetus.”

In 2007, members of Kirchner’s coalition encouraged Victoria to run for a congressional seat representing Buenos Aires Province. She was unsure whether she was ready to trade activism for a role in formal politics. But after some persuasion, she agreed. At 30, she became the youngest person ever elected to Argentina’s Congress, and the first stolen child of the dictatorship. She committed herself fully to the defence of human rights. “I owe this to my parents,” she later wrote, “who gave their lives to build a more just world for their daughters.”

On 18 October 2014, Victoria gave birth to a baby girl of her own. She named her daughter Trilce, after a book of poems by César Vallejo, a portmanteau of triste and dulce, sad and sweet. Two weeks later, she was in bed recovering from her C-section when she learned that there was to be a vote in the congressional committee on which she served on an abortion bill – an early step before a bill made it to Congress’ floor. She grabbed a bandage, wound it tight around her abdomen, swaddled Trilce, and lurched over to Congress. “I didn’t want my daughter to go through what I had,” Victoria said.

Victoria Donda (centre) at a session in the Chamber of Deputies of Congress in Buenos Aires, 9 May 2017.
View image in fullscreen
Victoria Donda (centre) at a session in the Chamber of Deputies of Congress in Buenos Aires, 9 May 2017. Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy
Many years earlier, when Victoria was 19, she had used her savings to get a clandestine abortion in a “more or less acceptable place”. Later, when she’d accompanied other women forced to have abortions under worse circumstances, she’d realised she’d been lucky.

Abortion was a criminal act in Argentina, strictly prohibited by the nation’s 1921 penal code unless the pregnancy presented a threat to the woman’s life or health, or in cases of rape. Fearing legal repercussions, doctors were often unwilling to proceed even in permitted cases.

When the 2014 abortion bill did not go forward, owing to a technicality, Victoria realised the campaign needed a new approach. Between the end of the dictatorship in 1983 and 2016, at least 3,040 women died of complications from abortion in Argentina. The true number was likely much higher since hospitals often logged the cause of death after abortions went wrong as “sepsis”. Hundreds of thousands of clandestine abortions were carried out each year, of which more than 50,000 ended up in public hospitals after developing complications. It was an unspoken healthcare crisis. Yet even progressive parties did not want to touch it. Just as silence had smothered the dictatorship’s crimes for two decades of democracy, it hung over this issue too. Victoria wanted abortion dragged out into the open.

In 2016, while traveling through Tucumán, one of Argentina’s poorest provinces, Victoria learned of a young woman serving an eight-year sentence for homicide after having had what appeared to be a miscarriage. Belén, the pseudonym by which the woman came to be known, had checked into a hospital in 2014 for severe stomach pain. Unaware she was pregnant, she was arrested on the spot after staff claimed to have found a foetus in a toilet she had used. Police handcuffed her to her hospital bed, then transferred her to a prison.

Victoria knew that a poor woman from a poor province imprisoned over a suspected abortion wouldn’t make national headlines – unless there was outrage outside the country. She arranged a visit from the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, who, after hearing Belén’s story, publicly condemned Argentina in the nation’s Congress in May 2016. The next day, his words, and the case, dominated national news.

After more than two years in prison, Belén was released in August 2016 and acquitted in March 2017. The case helped “show what the consequences of abortion were”, Victoria said. “And the consequences were that if you were poor, you ended up dead or in prison. The rich could always pay for them. But not the poor.”

Over the next few years, Argentina’s increasingly powerful feminist movement trained its attention on reproductive rights. In early 2018, President Mauricio Macri allowed a congressional debate on abortion for the first time in the nation’s history. On 6 March 2018, Victoria was one of four deputies who sponsored a bill proposing to legalise abortion up to 14 weeks.

As lawmakers and civilians made their cases for or against the bill over the next few months (in a rare set of proceedings, civilians were invited to speak before Congress), opponents repurposed the language of a crime Argentines were now all too familiar with, claiming that abortion was “the real forced disappearance of people”. In this way, many of the same people who denied that 30,000 people had been disappeared under the dictatorship now accused progressives – feminists in particular – of being the real killers in Argentina.

At the urging of a friend, Victoria read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale during those heady weeks of debate. Atwood has said she took inspiration from Argentina for the idea of giving babies from the lower classes to the ruling class. “It was hard,” Victoria recalled of reading the book. “I thought a lot about my mum. Locked up. With no possibility to choose,” she said.

On 13 June 2018, Congress’s Chamber of Deputies voted on the bill. Victoria leaned into a microphone planted on her desk. “How can Argentines look at the world, this developed world we strive to resemble, when we have an authoritarian gene in us that makes us lock up women to have children? What kind of perverse project led us to have women kidnapped and disappeared and forced to give birth, as if their uteruses were spoils of war, and the results of those uteruses, those babies, were also spoils of war?” Her voice boomed as lawmakers around her rose to their feet, their applause echoing through the chamber.

After a million women gathered to demonstrate, the bill passed the Chamber of Deputies with the smallest of margins. Two months later, it was struck down by the Senate. But on 30 December 2020, Argentina’s Congress approved a law allowing abortion up to 14 weeks. A few months later, an eccentric economist named Javier Milei launched a political campaign that combined dictatorship denialism and promises to repeal the abortion law. He was elected Argentina’s president in November 2023.

Imet Victoria Donda in 2024 in a cafe in Boedo, a bohemian neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. Outside, a torrential downpour pelted the streets. The previous week, Victoria had sat in a small courtroom, chapel-like in its intimacy, as a judge handed her uncle, Adolfo Donda, a 15-year sentence for his role in her abduction and for concealing her identity. After having refused to see her years earlier in prison, because he said she was not a “recognised” family member, during the trial Adolfo had scolded her for going against her own “blood”. “Family is sacred, Victoria,” he had said. In their ruling, the judges described what happened to Cori during labour as “dehumanised childbirth”. It was the first time a ruling in one of Argentina’s stolen-baby cases used those words.

Victoria did not forgive Adolfo. But she did forgive Juan Antonio Azic, the man she had once called her father and now referred to as “my appropriator”. After emerging from a coma after his suicide attempt in 2003, he had encouraged Victoria to take the DNA test that confirmed her identity as a daughter of the disappeared – which, in 2015, helped secure his own conviction for her kidnapping. Far from the glare of any camera, Victoria, over the years, regularly visited him in prison, bringing him small honey-glazed croissants called medialunas. He is now serving the remainder of his sentence under house arrest and Victoria continues to visit him. “I still love him,” she said quietly, gazing out the window as thick raindrops hit the pane.

Later she pulled out her phone and scrolled through pictures of Trilce flashing bucktoothed grins at abortion protests. “We fought so hard for that law, and my daughter was right there with us,” she said, smiling at her child. With her dark, disheveled locks, hooded eyes and broad grin, Trilce looked unmistakably like Victoria. She also looked a lot like Cori.

Adapted from Sex and Dissent: Stories of Feminist Resistance in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain, published by Penguin … See MoreSee Less

The long shadow of Argentina’s dictatorship: she wasn’t who she thought she was – neither was her father | Meaghan Beatley

www.theguardian.com

The long read: The political rift between them was profound. Then one evening, a kiss goodbye sent her on a remarkable journey that continues today

United Public Workers for Action

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Multiple arrests made at Jake Lang’s anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn

www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2026/08/18/jake-lang-dearborn-muslim-pig-roast-…

Multiple arrests made at Jake Lang’s anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn
Kara Berg
Julia Cardi
The Detroit News
Aug. 18, 2026Updated Aug. 20, 2026, 3:03 p.m. ET

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Dearborn— Tensions flared in Dearborn Tuesday evening as hundreds gathered for a visit by self-described anti-Islamic activist Jake Lang, his latest stop in the predominantly Arab American community in recent months. Lang, 31, a former Florida U.S. Senate candidate, served four years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack before being pardoned by President Donald Trump. Tuesday marked at least his third visit to Dearborn, where he called out a Christian prayer and insulted Islam. Lang told The Detroit News last week he expected trouble at the event. His visit comes weeks after he clashed with participants in a large religious procession. City officials Monday urged residents not to engage with Lang, saying outsiders are seeking to sow hate and portray Dearborn as divided.

Dearborn police: Multiple arrests made
Julia Cardi

Cpl. Dan Bartok, the public information officer for the Dearborn Police Department, said there were multiple arrests Tuesday, but didn't give a specific number.

He said police plan to have more specifics on Wednesday.

Two groups of protestors clash before a Dearborn City Council meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026 in Dearborn, Mich.
“As the event continues, we are going to continue to make the appropriate arrests. We're going to have zero tolerance, just like we said from the very beginning, for any illegal behavior," he said. "If any illegal behavior occurs, we will arrest those individuals, regardless of affiliation. Our goal is to have a peaceful event.”

At least two arrests as crowd lingers
Kara Berg

Even after anti-Muslim activist Jake Lang went inside Dearborn's library for the City Council meeting, hundreds remained outside. At least one man was arrested and escorted off by police.

An attendee is arrested at a gathering where anti-Muslim activist Jake Lange spoke on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026.
Eddie Kabacinski watched as police pepper-sprayed another man near him. He called the police's response overkill.

"This is disgusting," said Kabacinski, a veteran. "…These guys look like they’re Roman gladiators."

“This is not right. This is overkill.”

Dearborn Police have denied that force was used during the protest, including pepper spray.

Dearborn mayor: 'You belong here'
Julia Cardi

After the public comment portion of the meeting, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud addressed the crowd.

He spoke about the fear Lang’s visit has stoked in Dearborn. He didn’t send his own daughter to day care Tuesday, and some business owners chose not to open. A young boy he met Tuesday in the community asked him if the “crusaders” were coming to kill him.

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Crosswords Promo January 2025
Lang addresses Dearborn council
Julia Cardi

During a packed meeting of the Dearborn City Council, Lang addressed the council for about two minutes as part of the public comment portion. He insulted Muslims and spoke of a Christian crusade about to come.

“These people are coming to destroy us," he said.

Anti-Muslim Activist Jake Lang lowers his head in prayer during the Dearborn City Council meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026.
Lang's comments were greeted by both boos and cheers. Afterward, the council president struggled to restore order. Lang left shortly after his comments. … See MoreSee Less

Multiple arrests made at Jake Lang’s anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn

www.detroitnews.com

Jake Lang, who has visited Dearborn before, called for more immigration enforcement and attacked Islam. City officials urged residents not to react.

United Public Workers for Action updated their status.

5 days ago

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United Public Workers for Action

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Trump's Supporters The Fangul Family Slave Labor Conditions for Hatian and Dominican Workers
Sugar Importer With Trump Ties Said to Maintain Abusive Labor Practices
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/business/economy/trump-central-romana-sugar-forced-labor.html
A watchdog group said the Dominican company continued to violate labor standards after President Trump lifted an import ban last year.

A worker wearing a hat, gloves and long sleeves cutting tall brown sugar cane with a large blade.
Cutting sugar cane on a plantation in the Dominican Republic in 2023. Concerns over forced labor and human rights abuses in the Dominican sugar sector have existed for decades.Credit…Erika Santelices/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Ana Swanson
Ana Swanson covers international trade and is based in Washington.
Aug. 18, 2026
Weeks after President Trump began his second term, his administration quietly lifted a measure that had blocked a major sugar producer in the Dominican Republic from shipping its product to the United States over concerns about forced labor at the company’s plantations.

The owner of the company, Central Romana, has cultivated close political ties to Mr. Trump, donating to his 2024 campaign and his White House ballroom project. José Fanjul, a Cuban American businessman known as Pepe, has hosted Mr. Trump at his Fifth Avenue apartment and attended a state dinner at the White House welcoming King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the United States.

The decision to allow Central Romana to send sugar to the United States has raised inferences of political interference, along with concern from labor groups that have been monitoring working conditions on the company’s Dominican farms.

On Tuesday, one nonprofit watchdog group, the Corporate Accountability Lab, released a report saying that many of the abusive conditions that led to the United States’ blocking sugar from Central Romana in 2022 had not been rectified.
The farm’s workers, most of whom are of Haitian descent, are still laboring under abusive working conditions, earning poverty wages, working excessive overtime and facing intimidation and threats from their superiors, the group said. The report added that workers live in dilapidated and overcrowded company-owned housing, some of which lacks electricity and potable water.

Corporate Accountability Lab is an independent nonprofit that describes its mission as holding corporations legally accountable. The group carried out more than 100 formal interviews on Central Romana’s farms over the course of five visits in the past several years, it said.

Charity Ryerson, the watchdog group’s executive director, said that the group’s staff members and investigators had regularly visited Central Romana’s farms and worker housing between January 2023 and December 2025 and spoke with dozens of workers in that time.

“What we saw was depressingly familiar — more or less the same conditions that were present when C.B.P. issued the withhold release order,” she said, referring to Customs and Border Protection, which administers such import bans. “The small changes we did see were largely superficial, and, importantly, didn’t address the pervasive climate of fear among workers,” she added.

Central Romana has denied accusations of any labor violations at its farms, stating that the watchdog group’s report is “riddled with inaccuracies and untruths.” In a response to questions from The New York Times, Jorge A. Sturla Ferrer, a spokesman for Central Romana, said that presenting the accusations as facts was “defamatory in nature.”

“Central Romana continues to operate with the ongoing improvements for the working and living conditions of our employees and their dependents, always committed with their welfare in compliance with international regulations and in accordance with the applicable laws of the Dominican Republic,” he said.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in the Dominican Republic?Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
The White House referred a request for comment to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Central Romana is the largest sugar producer in the Dominican Republic. The firm is partly owned by members of the Fanjul family, who also operate a conglomerate that sells sugar under the Domino Sugar and C&H brands. Pepe Fanjul and his brother Alfonso, who died this month, have been politically active for decades, donating to both Democrats and Republicans.

In 2024, the Fanjul Corporation gave a $1 million donation to Make America Great Again, a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump, and $413,000 to the Republican National Committee. It gave lesser contributions to Democrats. Pepe Fanjul also hosted a $50 million fund-raiser for the Trump campaign in May 2024, The New Yorker reported.

In October, at a White House dinner for ballroom donors, Mr. Trump called out Mr. Fanjul’s contributions.

“Pepe, you were fantastic,” the president said. “He’s got a little sugar business. He has a monopoly on the world’s sugar — I would say that’s a good business.”

“He’s been great and a supporter right from the beginning for years,” he added.

José Fanjul smiling for a picture while wearing a dark suit, white shirt, gray tie and holding a drink in a glass.
José Fanjul, a Cuban American businessman commonly known as Pepe, has cultivated close ties to President Trump.
Credit…Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images
The Trump administration has recently taken aim at the forced labor laws of other countries. In July, it issued tariffs on more than 80 countries that it said did not adequately ban imports of goods made with forced labor.

The United States has had a longstanding ban on imports of goods made with forced labor. The Trump administration has pushed other countries to adopt such bans in its trade deals. Last month, it added 43 companies to a list that bars goods suspected to be made with forced labor in Xinjiang from the United States. But critics say the United States still has shortfalls on its own labor protections.

Human rights groups have long raised concerns about abuses in the Dominican sugar industry. Many of the workers on Dominican sugar farms are Haitian migrants or Dominicans of Haitian descent. Some do not have citizenship in the Dominican Republic or in Haiti, making it difficult for them to leave and find other jobs.

In its research at Central Romana farms, Corporate Accountability Lab said it found that these stateless workers, as well as elderly workers who had not received retirement benefits, were the most vulnerable to exploitation.

In November 2022, the Biden administration said that it had identified conditions of forced labor on Central Romana’s plantations during an investigation and blocked the company’s sugar from the United States.

That ignited a fierce lobbying push from Central Romana, which spent more than $1.3 million on lobbying from the beginning of 2023 through the end of 2025, according to tracking from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance group. The company hired several well-connected lobbying firms, Akin Gump, Barsa Strategies and Patino Brewster & Partners. Those firms employed former officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees C.B.P. and the import bans, as well as a former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

One of Akin Gump’s activities was filing Freedom of Information Act requests with Customs and Border Protection and other agencies in the Biden administration to seek information about the communications between government officials and Corporate Accountability Lab and other groups working on labor issues, the report said.

Corporate Accountability Lab said that, while the import ban was in place from 2022 to 2025, it saw some limited improvements on the company’s farms, including some repairs to housing and latrines. An electrification project also connected at least one of the housing areas to the electrical grid, the report said.
Image
A man holding a farming plow outside of cinder block buildings.
A worker sharpening a plow in a Central Romana community home to sugar cane workers and their families. Corporate Accountability Lab found that some of the worker housing lacked electricity and potable water.Credit…Carlos Berríos Polanco/Sipa USA, via Associated Press
The company also took some steps to make health care more accessible in sugar cane fields, including deploying a medical van to treat minor health issues.

But workers interviewed by Corporate Accountability Lab on the topic described the services as still inadequate. And the worker settlements that the group visited were plagued with many of the same conditions, including a lack of electricity and potable water and poor housing, the report said.

After Mr. Trump came into office in January 2025, Corporate Accountability Lab said that customs officials reached out to them to set up a briefing on their findings, scheduled for Feb. 28, 2025. But the day before, the meeting was canceled, and the labor group’s attempts to reschedule were ignored.

Two weeks later, C.B.P. modified the import order against Central Romana. Though some customs officials have said that the protocol for lifting an order is not well defined, others said that it did not go through established processes.

Corporate Accountability Lab said that the circumstances of the reversal were “procedurally irregular and followed significant donations to the Trump campaign.” The group also said it “saw no evidence” that the company engaged in the type of remediation process that C.B.P. had previously recommended.

One current official, who declined to be named for fear of retribution, told The Times that the way the order was modified was unusual and that he believed the decision was political. Another official said that the decision to lift the order came to customs officials directly from the White House.

Such orders are typically supposed to remain in effect until the importer produces proof that its supply chain is free of forced labor, a process that C.B.P. has said should involve a thorough review of its supply chains, including engaging with workers and worker-led organizations.

But Central Romana’s order was changed on the condition that it provide certification within the next six months that it had complied with applicable labor standards, the report said. The customs agency did not issue a news release about the change, as it had with some previous moves.

Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez, who led global labor policy in the State Department during the Biden administration, said that when she left government in January 2025, shortly before the import ban was lifted, issues at Central Romana persisted.

“I had hoped that the company would pursue a strategy that would really meaningfully address the threats that workers faced and the intimidation and exploitation that they reported, but by the time I left, it had not been resolved,” she said.

In June, six Dominican civil society organizations wrote an open letter arguing that forced labor continued on Central Romana’s farms. Since 2023, the Dominican Republic has been carrying out a plan to deport thousands of people of Haitian descent, worsening a climate of fear and dependency among farm workers, the groups said.

In the months after the lifting of the import ban, Patino Brewster, Barsa Strategies and Akin Gump all filed to terminate their lobbying registrations.

Kitty Bennett contributed research and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. … See MoreSee Less

Sugar Importer With Trump Ties Said to Maintain Abusive Labor Practices

www.nytimes.com

A watchdog group said the Dominican company continued to violate labor standards after President Trump lifted an import ban last year.

United Public Workers for Action

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Supporters rally for those arrested during C&H Sugar worker strike
www.eastbaytimes.com/2026/08/19/ch-sugar-union-strike-arrest-rally/
Community members gather outside the George D. Carroll Courthouse to participate in a rally on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, in Richmond, Calif. The rally was in support of people arrested during a strike at a C&H Sugar facility in Crockett, California. (Aric Crabb_Bay Area News Group)
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Community members gather outside the George D. Carroll Courthouse to participate in a rally on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, in Richmond, Calif. The rally was in support of people arrested during a strike at a C&H Sugar facility in Crockett, California. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Sierra-Headshot.jpg
By SIERRA LOPEZ | slopez@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: August 19, 2026 at 4:06 PM PDT

RICHMOND — Ten people arrested during a strike by C&H Sugar Company employees faced court hearings Wednesday. Outside the courthouse, supporters demanded charges be dropped and that a more united labor movement be established moving forward.

Chants of “Defend the Crockett 10” echoed through the courtyard at the George D. Carroll Court House in Richmond on Wednesday in support of 10 individuals arrested during a July 21 strike outside the Crockett factory.

At their previously scheduled hearings Wednesday, the 10 learned that charges had not yet been filed by the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office. The office declined to comment at this time.

Will Wright, 29, one of the 10 arrested in July, said he was told the district attorney has a year to file and Wright and others should call every three weeks for an update.

Community members gather outside the George D. Carroll Courthouse to participate in a rally on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, in Richmond, Calif. The rally was in support of people arrested during a strike at a C&H Sugar facility in Crockett, California. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Community members gather outside the George D. Carroll Courthouse to participate in a rally on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, in Richmond, Calif. The rally was in support of people arrested during a strike at a C&H Sugar facility in Crockett, California. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
“This is the capitalist system of injustice that they have, where they hold charges like this, trumped up charges, over the heads of Black and Brown people, working-class people, habitually,” Wright said to a crowd of supporters after walking out of his court hearing. “We will be back and we will continue to fight and defend the Crockett 10.”

About 90 C&H Sugar employees, represented by International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 6, had been on strike since June 15 after reaching an impasse in contract negotiations. According to workers, the company had offered a 20% raise over five years in exchange for eliminating retirement benefits and cutting sick leave by half.

Strikers returned to work July 29 under the terms of their old contract for a 60-day negotiation period.

A week before their return, deputies with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office arrested 10 people after a picket line outside the Crockett C&H Sugar Company factory was deemed an unlawful assembly.

A representative with C&H Sugar, or its ASR Group, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but previously told ABC7 News that union members should “stop the reckless, dangerous and illegal activity, and come to the table.”

Yohannes Dagne, left, takes part in a rally outside the George D. Carroll Courthouse on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, in Richmond, Calif. The rally was in support of people arrested during a strike at a C&H Sugar facility in Crockett, California. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Yohannes Dagne, left, takes part in a rally outside the George D. Carroll Courthouse on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, in Richmond, Calif. The rally was in support of people arrested during a strike at a C&H Sugar facility in Crockett, California. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
“Union members outside our gates are engaged in reckless and unsafe actions, endangering the health and safety of drivers, independent contractors and their fellow employees as well as unlawfully blocking commerce in and out of our refinery,” a C&H spokesperson said.

Of those arrested, five were members of ILWU Local 10 which has been supporting Local 6 during their strike, Wright said. Another five, including Wright, were affiliated with the Internationalists Group and the East Bay Internationalist Club, socialist organizations that advocate for the working class.

Deputies said at the time that six of those arrested were booked at the Martinez Detention Facility on suspicion of remaining present at an unlawful assembly after being lawfully ordered to disperse. Some may also face charges for battery, obstruction and resisting a police officer.

“They tried to demonstrate the union principle: picket lines mean don’t cross. So the arrests that day were in effect, revenge for that action,” Wright said. “The struggle of Local 6 and Local 10 is intrinsically linked to the entire struggle of the working class.”

A similar message was shared by multiple groups at the rally.

Among those in attendance or lending support were the Oakland Education Association, a union representing 3,000 Oakland Unified School District employees; two of the Stanford 11 students facing charges of their own for a campus protest; Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social advocacy organization for the working class; and Boots Riley, an activist, musician and filmmaker who recently wrote and directed “I Love Boosters,” a 2026 film based in the Bay Area starring Keke Palmer.

“I truly believe in my heart that this could be the start of something very beautiful,” said Nate Arnold, a member of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192 and the Alameda Labor Council, a workers rights advocacy group. “Love is an action, not a word. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do and you have to follow through with the action or it’s just an empty word.” … See MoreSee Less

Supporters rally for those arrested during C&H Sugar worker strike

www.eastbaytimes.com

Chants of “Defend the Crockett 10” echoed through the courtyard at the George D. Carroll Court House in Richmond on Wednesday in support of 10 individuals arrested during a July 21 strike outside …

United Public Workers for Action

6 days ago

ILWU & Supporters Rally At Richmond Superior Court HouseTo Demand "Drop The Charges On Crockett 10
youtu.be/O5Yf7ZIP-A8
ILWU 10 members, officials and union members and supporter who had been arrested at the C&H Crockett strike picket line rallied at the Richmond Superior Court on July 19, 2026. They called for the Contra Costa District Attorney to drop the charges against 10 members and supporters who were arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges at the Crockett C & H strike on July 21, 2026.
The ILWU Local 6 strikers returned to work for 60 days under the old contract but 3 workers had been fired by the company before the strike started.
Additional Media:
At Crockett SugarFest Workers Speak Out On ILWU 6 Strike Against Union Busting C&H Sugar Refinery
youtu.be/VQZbJos-cg4
The Class War Against The ILWU By C&H Fanjul Family In Crockett & The Trump Fascist Government
youtu.be/La1RhIs3-kw
Hawaiian Workers Join ILWU Local 6 Strike Against C&H ASR Fanjul Family Refinery in Crockett
youtu.be/99_qhAJ8d98
ILWU10 Workers Protest Unloading At Levin Terminal Of Ship Of Sugar To Bust ILWU6 C&H Strikers
youtu.be/QEkB5QUAQG8
ILWU 6 Workers Strike At Crockett C&H ASR Sugar Plant To Protect Their Contract & Conditions
youtu.be/PY6Rj82n_cs
ILWU Struggles 1984-2010, The Struggle Continues
youtu.be/ABosvjawnj4
The Sugar Babies Amy Serrano 2005 2006
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVcyRjy52Q
Juneteenth & The Fight Today Against Resegregation & A Fascist Government-Time For Mass Action
youtu.be/3fTLkPEEu34
On Juneteenth, ILWU Local 10 VP Trent Willis Talks About History & Struggle For General Strike Today
youtu.be/-dqrEQHYzqI
Kill Tariffs Not Workers! Teamsters & ILWU Members Protest Tariffs & Trade War At The Port Of Oakland
youtu.be/DdIzrM2B-9w
ILWU 10 Solidarity Meeting On Palestine: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
youtu.be/XiPs6lccJM0
Zim Line Hit With Pickets-ILWU 10 & 34 Workers Stand Against Israeli Apartheid
youtu.be/2Gp503j9WSk
Mass March & Picket At Oakland Port To Stop Israel's Zim Line Ship Piraeus To Protest Crimes In Gaza
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcJHlnq4YIo
Danny Glover Joins ILWU 10 In Supporting Freedom For Mumia on February 16, 2023
youtu.be/j0qJX4zDf9s
ILUW 1984 San Francisco Local 10 & 34 Anti-Apartheid Action Against Racist South African
For More Information
ILWU 6 Crockett C&G Strike Fund
square.link/u/ifFpgkRO
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net … See MoreSee Less

Labor Media – Labor Media

www.labormedia.net

Atmosphere Intensifies at Delaney Hall after Death of Detainee www.insidernj.com/watch-atmosphere-intensifies-at-delaney-hall-after-death-of-detainee/ Atmosphere Intensifies at Delaney Hall af…