With perennial themes about fighting the Man, challenging orthodoxy, and offering a release valve for general pent-up dissatisfaction, punk rock has always been a genre by and for the working class. But when the proto-punk sound crossed the Atlantic in the mid-1970s and collided with the socioeconomic turmoil roiling in the United Kingdom, that ethos took on a more aggressive proletarian bent. From the declining factory towns rocked by stagflation, unemployment, and government abandonment, the UK punk scene emerged with seminal acts like The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and Buzzcocks. While not always or explicitly promoting pro-labor policies in their music, tracks from that era like Crass’ “Do They Owe Us a Living,” and The Clash’s “Clampdown,” made clear that workers’ rights were on punks’ minds, even if they weren’t reading theory.
As the UK entered the Thatcher era, an even more explicitly pro-worker sound began to emerge in the nascent punk subgenres of Oi! and street punk that felt the first wave of Brit punks had become a bit too pretentious and arty. Things only worsened for U.K. workers over the 80s as Thatcher’s legislative reforms decimated union numbers and austerity measures left the already hollowed-out communities in even more of a lurch, resulting in entire punk albums grappling with class conflict—consider this your decennial reminder to go listen to Chumbawumba’s Tubthumper in its entirety. The pro-union punk sound had also made its way back across the pond just in time for its American cousins like Dead Kennedys, The Replacements, Pinkerton Thugs, and Dropkick Murphys to carry the agitating flame through the crackdowns on labor wrought by Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
All this to say, there’s a lot of poetic irony to unpack in the news recently reported in See/Saw that Sony Music Entertainment is planning to shut down a warehouse that designs, prints, and ships merch for punk acts right after they voted to unionize.
Minneapolis’ Kings Road Merch was co-founded by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, sources staff from the local music scene, and processes merchandise for acts like Rancid, Descendents, and the aforementioned Dropkick Murphys. Sony bought the company in June of 2025 through its distribution subsidiary, The Orchard. Less than a year later, on April 9th, working conditions at Kings Road had deteriorated so much that staff formally petitioned their manager to form a union under the Teamsters Local 970. On May 11th, they unanimously voted to do just that, citing unfair contracts as well as repeated and systematic pay discrepancies from their new corporate overlords.
As one warehouse worker (and frontperson of local hardcore band BUIO OMEGA), Greer, described the changes to See/Saw, “We were all kind of feeling like, ‘Damn, there’s some not-cool shit happening.’”
Curiously, just hours before their first scheduled bargaining session with the newly formed union on June 23rd, Sony announced that it was actually planning to shutter the warehouse outright. While this might seem like a flagrant act of retaliatory union-busting at first blush, Sony pinky swears the timing is just a crazy coincidence.
When asked about the closure by Pitchfork, a Sony rep said that by the time they found out about the staff’s intent to unionize, the company’s plans to close the warehouse were already “many months in the making.” The representative offered Pitchfork’s reporter no evidence to back up this claim.
A conversation between Sony lawyers and Teamsters Local 970 president Chad Reichow on April 29th was the first time Sony floated the idea of closing the warehouse. Reichow told Pitchfork he took Sony’s threat as an idle one, made in the throes of negotiation after his inquiry about when they planned to shut the warehouse down was met with “well, we don’t know yet.”
In true punk fashion, Kings Road Merch’s newly minted union is dead set on going the distance with this existential fight. As the staff makes clear in a recent press release, they consider Sony’s tactic a textbook case of union-busting and demand that the closure decision be reversed so they can get back to work making “kickass merch” for “bands [who] write music about individual freedom, protecting human rights over profits, and standing up to tyranny.”
