Spreckels Sugar Company will shut down its refinery in Brawley, California according to a statement by the company. The last remaining sugar beet refinery in California will begin laying off workers in July with 26 workers, followed by another 28 in August, with the facility fully shutting down by June of next year. In total 400 workers will lose their jobs, including 100 full-time employees and 300 part-time employees.
Spreckels employee Miquel Ramirez told local news station KYMA that: “It was a surprise for us, we weren’t ready for this. We know it’s going to affect a lot in the Imperial Valley, not only for us workers, but the community. Many people depend on this factory. It’s not only four-hundred workers left without a job but their families as well.”
The owner of Spreckels, Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative (SMBSC) said in a statement that the refinery closure was in response to long term financial strains at the facility and pressure from competition, specifically foreign sugar imports. Built in 1947, the aging infrastructure of the plant had become expensive to maintain and modernize, with the company spending $100 million in repairs and updates in the past decade.
Issues regarding negotiations with the California Beet Growers Association may also have played a role as the company and growers failed to reach an agreement SMBSC considered viable to keep the facility open.
The closure of the refinery will have wide reaching impacts across the Imperial Valley.
Directly, the closure will destroy 400 jobs in the most impoverished county in California and that also has the highest unemployment rate. Seventeen percent of families fall below the federal poverty line and unemployment averaged 18 percent in 2024, with previous rates breaching 30 percent.
Much of the local economy relies on agriculture, with Imperial county producing $3 billion a year in agricultural products. Sugar beets are the eighth largest crop in the county with 28,000 acres under cultivation and 100,000 acre-feet of water used to irrigate them. These farms produce an average of 40 tons of sugar beet per acre that yields 14,000 lbs of sugar per acre. Direct farm sales are estimated to be worth $50 million while total economic activity from sugar beet cultivation is estimated at around $100 million.
With the closure of the sugar refinery, it is unclear how the local economy will adjust to the sudden shock. With no other refineries for hundreds of miles continued sugar beet production is unlikely. Farms could switch to alfalfa, the most common crop in the county, but the market for alfalfa is already saturated and unlikely to handle an additional 28,000 acres. Overproduction is so high that the Imperial Irrigation District offered to pay farmers to not grow alfalfa in 2024 and billboards throughout the area carry the warning “Burn a bail, go to jail” from local officials attempting to prevent farmers setting their own crops on fire to reduce supply.
Indirect job losses could grow by thousands as farmers either fallow their fields or switch to other crops with different labor requirements and economic impacts. Farm laborers from Mexico could lose their jobs, agricultural supply businesses may cut staff without the business of sugar beet farmers and other industries involved, like trucking, will be affected.
Sugar beet farmers could organize an effort to purchase the facility and operate it themselves. However, the Calexico Chronicle quoted Shelby Trimm, executive director of both the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association and the California Beet Growers Association, as saying that SMBSC had refused any offer to sell the facility.
“Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative … have told us growers directly,” said Trimm, “‘We will never, ever sell the plant. We will only close it down.’ And why they’re saying that is because that sales quota to them is worth more than gold. I know that people have offered, other companies have thrown out numbers. ‘Hey, could this company buy it? Could growers gather around together and buy the plant?’ They will not do that because they do not want to lose their allocation.”
This is a reference to the 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act. The act sets a minimum price for sugar and controls sugar imports to protect local producers. Included in the act are provisions to set market allotments for US companies. The United States Department of Agriculture then sets those allotments based on historic production figures. Therefore, selling the facility could damage the market allotment provided to SMBSC by the federal government.
SMBSC is undergoing a process of consolidating production at its far more modern refinery operations in Minnesota. By keeping the decommissioned refinery in Brawley the company would likely be able to hold onto the allocations based on Spreckels’ historic production rates even with the refinery shuttered for the foreseeable future.
Since the announcement of the layoffs the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 135, which represents the workers at Spreckels and 13,000 workers in San Diego and Imperial counties, has not issued a public statement on the refinery closure. KYMA reported that six Spreckels employees had traveled to meet with SMBSC to speak with management and quoted UFCW 135 President Todd Walters as saying, “I am going to do everything I can to try and protect those jobs and keep them here if we can, and that’s working with elected officials to help bring both sides together.”
Democratic Congressman Raul Ruiz offered a similar statement, saying “I urge all stakeholders to come together once again and exhaust every option to save this facility and the communities it supports.”
This perspective of encouraging SMBSC and growers to renegotiate a deal to keep the refinery open is unlikely to yield results, however. SMBSC’s statement on the closure claims that the refinery requires $100 million in capital investments to make the facility viable financially. These costs would ultimately have to be shifted onto the growers through the form of lower prices to cover the cost of updating the facility. These costs would then ultimately have to be borne by both field workers and the workers at Spreckels as both SMBSC and the farm owners seek to offload costs onto the working class through the depression of labor costs and the increase of prices.
This policy of begging the farm and refinery owners to negotiate is a dead end for workers. The politicians and trade union bureaucrats will not lift a finger to prevent the further impoverishment of the poorest county in California.
Refinery workers must instead turn to their allies in the broader working class, connecting with the field laborers, who are also facing the destruction of their jobs as well as with the refinery workers in Renville, Minnesota where SMBSC is concentrating production.
The Imperial Valley has a powerful tradition of labor struggles by agricultural workers. During the 1920s and 30s several mass strikes were organized to fight for better pay and working conditions, making their greatest impact with the organization of both Mexican field workers and the predominantly white warehouse and packing workers, despite efforts by farm owners to divide workers by race. It is in this social force that workers will find the power to oppose the destruction of jobs and living standards, not in appeals to various groups of capitalist owners.