The Point: Watching “Partners” with students and re-learning the lessons of the labor movement

12/4/2025

This week’s Point is written by Nick Juravich, Associate Professor of History and Labor Studies and author of the recently published Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education.  As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.

It’s about respect. It’s always about respect.

Last week, with a lecture scheduled for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, I took the tried-and-true path of generations of educators before me: I showed a movie.

I had my pedagogical reasons, of course: our Labor Resource Center had just received a screener of a new short documentary film, “Partners,” which chronicles the organizing drive at the first unionized Starbucks stores in the nation, in Buffalo, New York. The Starbucks Workers United campaign was already on my syllabus for the following week, and Starbucks workers had just launched their ongoing “Red Cup Rebellion” strike at 95 locations across 65 cities (which has since grown to include locations in Massachusetts).

Still, I expected a relatively sleepy session, especially since I have the unique pleasure of teaching my large-format lecture in the “Media Auditorium” in the basement of Healey Library this semester, where temperatures have tended to hover around eighty degrees on good days. I could not have been more wrong.

It isn’t surprising that students enjoyed this film, which chronicles a determined, fearless, occasionally giddy, and frequently hilarious group of young people organizing their stores in the face of opposition from one of the largest corporate coffee chains in the world. “Partners” makes excellent use of smartphone video recorded by organizers throughout the campaign, which puts the viewer at the center of the action and narrates the events from the workers’ perspective, intercut with interviews with participants after the fact. The resulting thirty-nine-minute film has a visceral, immediate quality, particularly once the young baristas begin confronting Starbucks’ anti-union campaign, phones in hand.

It was precisely at this moment in the film that the students in our dim, overheated lecture hall came alive. Many laughed along with the workers as they watched top corporate brass from Starbucks descend on Buffalo to clean toilets for a day in an ill-conceived show of “support.” Some jeered and others gasped as bosses tried to tell the workers what was good for them in closed-door meetings and transparently lied about the union campaign. And they cringed as Starbucks founder Howard Schultz made his way to Buffalo, where he  rambled about the “shame” of his own working-class upbringing and analogized Starbucks’ corporate philosophy to Holocaust victims sharing blankets before fleeing the room when an organizer asked him to sign on to fair election principles (the workers didn’t have to record this themselves, as Starbucks proudly put the entire debacle on YouTube). None of this kept the workers in Buffalo from winning their union election, sparking a wildfire that has since reached more than 640 stores across the nation.

In our conversation afterwards, students came back to one idea repeatedly: respect. They know what this work looks like – many have done it themselves, whether at Starbucks or similar chains – and they’re intimately familiar with the gulf between the bosses’ professions of love for their workers and the indignities of just-in-time scheduling, favoritism, arbitrary policy and uniform changes, and everything else Starbucks workers chronicled as they explained their reasons for organizing. They knew disrespect when they saw it on screen, just as they know it in their own lives.

This realization unlocked a larger conversation about the material we’d studied all term: conditions matter, of course, but respect is a through-line in the history of the labor movement, and it remains so today. Starbucks Workers United is officially on an “unfair labor practice” strike because the company is transparently breaking labor law by not bargaining with the union in good faith. On Monday, they agreed to a $39 million settlement with the City of New York, paying out back pay to workers whose schedules were cut and shifted arbitrarily in defiance of city law for years (while this means real money for workers, it is a piddling sum for Starbucks, and it will not substantively slow their union-busting).

This all extends beyond Starbucks, of course; no amount of credentialing or professional status protects workers from the boss’s disrespect. As our UMass Amherst colleague Robert Pollin wrote in the Daily Hampshire Gazette last week, our Professional Staff Union is fighting an administration whose most recent contract offer was “unfair and even disrespectful to its professional staff members” (see this week’s “Nuts and Bolts” for the latest on how to support our union family in the PSU). The unwillingness of many university administrators to protect academic freedom – as exemplified by Northwestern and Oklahoma this week – is evidence of their lack of respect for basic faculty rights and academic freedom.

Watching “Partners” proved so very useful because it made this through-line of disrespect so evident. More students spoke up in our discussion afterward than have nearly all semester, and it was a reminder that dealing with that disrespect from the boss – in whatever job we work – is something that unites working people. This is a starting point, a place from which to assert the dignity of all labor and the respect that all workers deserve (and, while we’re at it, we can have a good laugh at the boss’s fumbling as we do).

PS – If you have an opportunity to see “Partners,” do; there’s a screening scheduled in Providence this weekend, and there will be more, including one here at UMass Boston, hopefully, in the new year.