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On December 9, 2021, Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, made history<\/a> as the first Starbucks workers to form a union in the United States. More than four years later, the 12,000 unionized workers at Starbucks locations across the country are still waiting<\/a> for their first contract. As negotiations have stalled between the company and Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), one of the biggest players in the 2020s resurgence of the U.S. labor movement has largely fallen out of the news.\u00a0<\/p>\n Baristas vs Billionaires<\/em>, a new documentary directed by filmmaker Mark Mori, seeks to bring these workers back into the spotlight. The film puts the ongoing struggle back in the news alongside SBWU\u2019s set of rolling strikes that launched<\/a> on November 13, coinciding with Starbucks\u2019s famous \u201cRed Cup Day,\u201d in response<\/a> to the company\u2019s failure<\/a> to return to the bargaining table.\u00a0<\/p>\n The film premiered<\/a> in October at the Buffalo International Film Festival in New York. Mori, who was a union member himself in his twenties when he worked at a steel mill, chose to follow a group of former Starbucks baristas who had worked across the three Buffalo locations that jointly announced their intent to unionize in 2021. The film tells the story of the founding of SBWU and the obstacles the union still faces in negotiating a contract. Well-known actor Susan Sarandon narrates the film, and actor Alec Baldwin is credited as a contributing producer.\u00a0<\/p>\n The film introduces each of the featured worker organizers in Buffalo alongside the conditions they faced at work that drove them to unionize. Shift supervisor Angel Krempa caught COVID-19 three times while working for the company, which gained notoriety when it refused to fully shut down<\/a> during the pandemic. Barista Sam Amato says in the film that he was earning $15 per hour after working at Starbucks for thirteen years. Workers\u2019 eligibility<\/a> for health care plans depended on how many hours they worked\u2014hours that were scheduled at the discretion of managers, leaving many working hours just shy of the amount needed to receive any health care benefits. Fed up, Starbucks workers across Buffalo began organizing at their stores.\u00a0<\/p>\n Buffalo has a strong history<\/a> of union organizing that made this fight personal for many of the workers. Several film participants\u2019 relatives were card-carrying union members or had helped organize unions at their steel and railroad jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an exceptional community here in Buffalo,\u201d Will Westlake, a Starbucks barista-turned SBWU organizer and interviewee in the documentary, said at a panel before the October premiere. \u201cWe call it the city of good neighbors. What\u2019s more neighborly than being able to talk to a coworker about how things could be better for you, for them, for everyone?\u201d<\/p>\n Public support of unions throughout the United States has been higher<\/a> in the 2020s than it has in the past nearly six decades. In 2025, 68 percent of U.S. adults surveyed by Gallup approved of unions. Baristas vs Billionaires <\/em>also includes clips of teachers and Amazon workers on strike to rally support for their own unions, demonstrating that the SBWU organizers are part of a much larger labor movement. Victoria Conklin, a former shift supervisor at a Buffalo Starbucks, and a lead<\/a> union organizer who is featured in the film, tells The Progressive<\/em>, \u201cI hope this [film] sort of brings a fresh face to the labor movement and shows people and the newer generations that it\u2019s possible, and you should organize every job you have\u2014not just the one that you go to college for, but the one you have in college, too.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Throughout 2022 and 2023, as more and more workers voted<\/a> to unionize and Starbucks Coffee Company came under fire for union busting<\/a>, then-interim CEO Howard Schultz, the obvious villain of the film, gave interviews<\/a> to people like The New York Times<\/em>\u2019s Andrew Ross Sorkin discussing fighting \u201ca third party\u201d in \u201ca battle for the hearts and minds of our people.\u201d The film intersperses some of these interview clips, as well as several from a Congressional hearing<\/a> in March 2023 on Starbucks\u2019s illegal union busting, juxtaposing the image Schultz pitches to his audience of Starbucks as a generous, fair, and progressive company with the conditions workers are experiencing.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the first workers announced they were seeking to unionize in 2021, Schultz traveled to Buffalo to give a speech to Starbucks workers at the unionizing stores indirectly convincing them to vote against forming a union. In the speech, the corporate head compared<\/a> the ethos of the company and the attitude employees should have to the selflessness of Holocaust prisoners sharing blankets among themselves on their way to Nazi concentration camps. The speech capped off an operation workers called the \u201cBuffalo SWAT Team,\u201d in which Starbucks flew in<\/a> more than one hundred executives and managers to work in Starbucks stores, sweeping floors while surveilling<\/a> workers and preventing them from having open conversations with each other about unionizing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Conklin cites Schultz\u2019s out-of-touch comments in the speech as the impetus for her to join the union organizing drive. Shift supervisor Gianna Reeve, who was nineteen years old at the time, stood up when Schultz finished speaking and asked him to sign an agreement to follow fair union election principles, after which he quickly left the room.<\/p>\n However, these workers were up against more than an uncomfortable speech by the company\u2019s CEO. Soon after joining her coworkers in union organizing, Conklin was fired<\/a> for arriving to work late\u2014the only one time in five years she had not been on time for her shift. Westlake was fired<\/a> for refusing to remove a suicide awareness pin from his green apron uniform; he wore the pin in remembrance of a coworker and fellow organizer who had died by suicide during the union campaign.\u00a0<\/p>\n The film also recounts the story of the \u201cMemphis Seven,\u201d a group of seven Starbucks employees who were fired<\/a> in retaliation for their workplace organizing in Memphis, Tennessee. In August 2022, a federal judge in that state ordered<\/a> Starbucks to rehire the workers, but the company appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided<\/a> with Starbucks in June 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the film moves through the story of the workers pushing for representation in their workplace, the camaraderie among them is evident. Their pride in their work and their care for their coworkers is undeniable, and is a foundation of the growing movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhere the world is right now and where our country is now, organized labor is probably the most important thing to making sure that the working class are able to retain their voice that has been stripped away so many times and is continuing to be stripped away currently,\u201d Krempa tells The Progressive<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s really important for workers to continue to organize, so that when other systems are failing, they\u2019re not failing themselves, and not failing each other.\u201d<\/p>\n The workers also had strong support from consumers, as Gianna Reeve explained in a question-and-answer session after the film\u2019s Buffalo premiere: \u201cStarbucks underestimated the connection between customer and barista. Sometimes, I\u2019ve seen just as many customers on a picket line as I have baristas.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The plan for the film\u2019s distribution is to screen at theaters, festivals, and in spaces such as union halls to further discussions about the potential for organizing to make change. As Glenn Silber, a co-producer of the film and longtime producer<\/a> of documentaries about political movements, notes, \u201cWe had to prove that people would be willing to come to the cinema, with their hard-earned dollars, [to see a] film that relates to the times we\u2019re living through, to know there\u2019s something out there that gives them hope and that\u2019s inspiring.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite the years of waiting, Starbucks organizers understand their fight is not over. Baristas vs Billionaires <\/em>offers a glimpse into the struggles that the wider labor movement will face, and how to garner the grit and solidarity necessary to succeed against corporate power.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n