Sony Music has announced plans to shutter a Minneapolis warehouse that processes merch for punk bands, prompting its staff to accuse the company of union-busting, See/Saw reports. Workers at Kings Road Merch—which acts as a supplier for punk luminaries including Rancid, Descendents, Dropkick Murphys, and Converge—had unanimously voted to unionize on May 11 this year, citing pay discrepancies and unfair contracts. Sony formally announced the warehouse’s closure on June 23, hours before the company’s first scheduled bargaining session with the union.
A Sony representative told Pitchfork that, by the time unionization plans came to Sony’s attention, its decision to close the warehouse had been “many months in the making.” (The representative declined to share evidence, citing ongoing negotiations with the union.) On April 9, staff had formally petitioned the warehouse manager to form a union under Teamsters Local 970. On April 27, Sony lawyers held their first Zoom call with Teamsters Local 970 president Chad Reichow. This is the first time any warehouse representative was informed of a plan to close the warehouse, Sony said.
Reichow decided to go ahead with the election and support warehouse staff in forming Kings Road Merch Union. “I just took it as a big corporation idle threat, basically, trying to see if you’d back off,” he told Pitchfork. On the April 27 Zoom call, Reichow had asked what date Sony planned to close the warehouse. “And they were like, ‘Well, we don’t know yet,’” he remembers. “So I just basically took it as a bluff.” Sony portrays the call as a good-faith disclosure to give Teamsters a heads up about its closure plans before workers went ahead with the election.
Sony had acquired Kings Road Merch, whose clients also include Neko Case and Tom Waits, in June 2025, via its subsidiary The Orchard. The short timespan between acquisition and the warehouse closure suggests the company perceived Kings Road Merch’s value to be in the brand and its clients, rather than the warehouse itself. Reichow said Sony’s lawyers told him they had simply “decided that it wasn’t for them to run a warehouse.” He added, “Companies make business decisions. I’m assuming it’s a legitimate choice that they had to close it. The timing of it is just not great. Obviously, right after somebody unionizes, the first thing you’re going to think of is union busting. Do I think that was their actual intention? I don’t know.”
Originally based in Los Angeles and founded by Brett Gurewitz, Kings Road Merch relocated to Minneapolis in June 2023. It continued operating under the Bad Religion co-founder until its acquisition by Sony. See/Saw notes Kings Road attracted a workforce broadly drawn from the Minneapolis punk scene. (Full disclosure: The article’s author, Evan Minsker, who runs See/Saw, is a former Pitchfork news editor.)
Two Kings Road employees told See/Saw that, as well as receiving low base pay, workers faced underpayment for overtime after the change in management. A union representative shared pay stubs with Pitchfork that they say showed “repeated and systematic errors with regard to pay.” The issue was raised with managers. Affected staff eventually received backpay, but the delays affected morale. The management was also inflexible on issues with temporary contracts, See/Saw notes. (Sony says a temp agency, not its own management, controls raises and bonuses for temp workers.) As a result of the “marked declines in working conditions”under Sony, as Kings Road Merch Union later put it, workers voted to unionize.
In an Instagram comment on See/Saw’s story, Dropkick Murphys expressed solidarity with the union: “We stand with you all. Thank you for all you’ve done for us all these years.”
