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, which also supplies the likes of 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 val...