Local Starbucks workers and their supporters, with a freshly announced major victory in their national unionization drive under their belts, are hosting a free film screening and discussion Wednesday evening at Upstate Films’ Midtown Kingston location. It's a sold-out show but the theater typically has a few no-shows.

“Partners: How Baristas Started a Union at Starbucks,” takes 40 minutes rich in on-the-ground footage to document the origins of Starbucks Workers United (SBW) whose 2021 unionization of baristas in a Buffalo store touched off the “Red Cup Rebellion.”

The Buffalo workers succeeded in the face of what they describe as Starbucks' “elaborate, illegal anti-union attack,” and the movement has since grown to include more than 11,000 workers at more than 550 Starbucks nationwide. Among that number, as of January, is the Starbucks at Massa Drive near Target in Kingston. Ulster County's five other locations have yet to be organized.

Starbucks’ public statements assert a commitment to “providing every person who wears the green apron a bridge to a better future” and in 2024, “to begin discussions on a foundational framework designed to achieve ratified collective bargaining agreements for represented partners, resolve litigation and ensure a fair process for organizing.”

Though those discussions have, SBW says, produced “33 tentative agreements that will tangibly improve the workplace” talks broke down when it came to wages and benefits. In response, and with the critical Christmas sales season approaching, the union responded with fresh vigor. “With the addition of hundreds of new union baristas from 26 new stores across nearly 20 new cities joining the picket lines,” SBW claims, “2,500 baristas from 120-plus stores across 85 cities are now engaged in [an] open-ended Unfair Labor Practices strike.”

The latest fruit of SBW's actions, this in the courts rather than on the picket line, came Monday, when New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced a $39 million settlement with Starbucks “after finding that the company had violated New York's Fair Workweek law more than half a million times between 2021 and 2024, when the company failed to give baristas set schedules and routinely and arbitrarily reduced their hours.” The city said it was “the largest worker protection settlement in New York City history. “

“Partners” is the work of director, producer and editor Chris Sessions, founder of Blanket Films, a labor movement-focused production company, and of producer Hillary Demmon, a Pittsburgh-based documentarian and a teaching professor of film and media studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Wednesday's screening is being co-hosted by Mid-Hudson Valley Democratic Socialists of America and includes a post-film discussion with a panel of local striking Starbucks workers and Natascha Elena Ullman, a staff writer at Labor Notes where she covers immigrant workers and the Mexican labor movement.

Kingston Wire has reached out for comment on the film from Starbucks corporate offices and for comment on working conditions from Ulster Starbucks employees but has not heard back as of Tuesday evening.

"Partners: How Baristas Started a Union at Starbucks" will be shown at Upstate Midtown, 591 Broadway, Kingston, Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m.