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.