LIHUE – Over 200 Gay & Robinson sugar workers are returning to work Monday after a three-week layoff to begin a spring harvest. Gay & Robinson and Amfac/JMB have settled a dispute over use of the bulk sugar loading terminal
LIHUE – Over 200 Gay & Robinson sugar workers are returning to work Monday after a three-week layoff to begin a spring harvest.
Gay & Robinson and Amfac/JMB have settled a dispute over use of the bulk sugar loading terminal located above the docks at Nawiliwili.
Rainy weather delayed the beginning of the harvest over the past week. A contract was signed on March 26 to open the bulk sugar facility to Gay &Robinson. It is owned by Amfac/JMB.
Sugar milled on Kaua’i is sent to a refining plant located at Crockett, California near San Francisco for processing by C&H Sugar.
Gay & Robinson is on target for a record 56,000-ton crop this year. The company will harvest sugar on former Kekaha Sugar lands leased from the state by Amfac/JMB.
The harvest is scheduled to last through October.
Amfac/JMB shut down its sugar mills in Lihue and Kekaha last year, leaving Gay & Robinson as the only operating sugar company on Kaua’i.
The only other operating sugar plantation in Hawai’i is Alexander & Baldwin’s Hawaii Commercial & Sugar Co. on Maui.
The two companies are now the only members of the HS&TC cooperative which is set up to ship sugar to the mainland.
