With perennial themes of fighting man, challenging orthodoxy, and offering a release valve for general discontent, 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 socio-economic turmoil in the United Kingdom, the ethos took on a more aggressively proletarian bent. From declining factory towns rocked by stagflation, unemployment and government abandonment, the UK punk scene emerged with major acts such as The Sex Pistols, The Damned and the Buzzcocks. Although they didn’t always or overtly promote pro-labor politics in their music, tracks from the era like Crass’s “Do They Owe Us a Living” and The Clash’s “Clampdown” made it clear that workers’ rights were on the punks’ minds, even if they weren’t studying theory.
As Britain entered the Thatcher era, an even more overtly pro-worker sound began to emerge in the nascent punk subgenres of Oi! and street punk, sensing the first wave of Brit punks, became a little too ambitious and daring. In the 1980s, the situation for British workers only worsened Thatcher’s legislative reforms dwindling union numbers and austerity measures further strained already hollowed-out communities, and as a result, all punk albums dealt with class conflict – consider your decade reminder to listen to it. Chumbawumba’s Tubthumper as a whole. The pro-union punk sound also returned to the pond in time for the Dead Kennedys, The Replacements, Pinkerton Thugs and Dropkick Murphys to carry the frenzy through the anti-labor pressures of their American cousins, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.
All that to say, there’s been a lot of poetic irony to uncover in the news lately gave information in See/I saw Sony Music Entertainment plans to close a warehouse that designs, prints and ships merchandise for punk acts immediately after voting to unionize.
Kings Road Merch in Minneapolis, founded by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, recruits from the local music scene and processes merchandise for acts like Rancid, Descendents and the aforementioned Dropkick Murphys. Sony acquired the company in June 2025 through its distribution subsidiary The Orchard. Less than a year later, on April 9, working conditions at Kings Road became so bad that workers formally petitioned their managers to form a union under Teamsters Local 970. On May 11, they voted unanimously to do so, citing unfair contracts as well as repeated and systematic differences in wage differentials for new corporate companies.
As a warehouse worker (and frontman of local hardcore band BUIO OMEGA), Greer described the changes. See/I saw“We all felt like, ‘Damn, unpleasant things are happening.’
Interestingly, a few hours before the first planned bargaining meeting with the newly formed union on June 23, Sony announced that it actually planned to close the warehouse entirely. While this may seem like an alliance-breaking response at first glance, Sony pinky swears that the timing is just a crazy coincidence.
when asked about closing by forkA Sony representative said the company’s plans to close the warehouse had already been “in the works for several months” when the workers learned of the unionization. The representative suggested fork‘s reporter has no evidence to support this claim.
An April 29 conversation between Sony lawyers and Chad Reichov, president of Teamsters Local 970, was the first time Sony had voiced the idea of closing the warehouse. Reichou said fork he took Sony’s threat as an empty one, only to be told “well, we don’t know yet” after his inquiry about when they planned to close the warehouse.
In true punk fashion, the newly formed association of Kings Road Merch is ready to go the distance with this existential struggle. As the staff recently announced press releasethey consider Sony’s tactics a textbook case of union-busting and demand that the shutdown be overturned so they can get back to work making “kickass merchandise” for bands that “make music about individual freedom, protect human rights over profit, and stand up to tyranny.”
