- Fingers
- Posts
- Fawn Weaver's union-busting RNDC rant
Fawn Weaver's union-busting RNDC rant
Video and transcript of the ultra-wealthy Uncle Nearest founder's bizarre anti-labor screed
Dave Infante
June 06, 2025
On Thursday night, Fawn Weaver, the founder of private-equity-backed “unicorn” spirits brand Uncle Nearest, posted a three-minute video to her Instagram account about Republic National Distributing Company’s California collapse. The monologue, which she tagged as “Nightcap with Fawn Weaver,” was filled with innuendo, smears, and unsubstantiated claims about the International Brotherhood of Teamsters' history in general and that union's contract with RNDC in California in particular. As of publication, the video remains on Weaver’s Instagram, so you can watch it there, or in the back-up I grabbed below.
You can read a full transcript of the video at the bottom of this post.
Her main contention, that the Teamsters somehow destroyed RNDC CA from within, has been swirling around on social media for the past few days. I've also received a couple tips along those lines from first-time sources, some with some pretty obvious axes to grind. As I wrote in my column this week at VinePair, though, the claim:
doesn’t square with the facts that a) Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits’ (SGWS) sales people are also repped by the Teamsters under the same joint contract, and b) maintaining a productive relationship with a union isn’t some novel or unheard-of management responsibility. It’s part of the job.
The bulk of my reporting so far suggests that executive mismanagement, cronyism/nepotism, and stiff competition were more relevant factors in RNDC's failure. Furthermore, the union contract was up for renegotiation this year, but the Teamsters told me RNDC unilaterally pulled out of the joint-bargaining process with SGWS that goes back decades. And I’ve yet to encounter a clear motive to explain why the union would force RNDC out of business in California, even if it could: it stands to lose some ~1,000 dues-paying members in the collapse.
If you don’t spend a lot of time around the labor movement, you wouldn’t necessarily clock this, but virtually everything Weaver says—from the mafia references, to the hoary pretense of speaking out for workers, to the just-asking-questions smarm—is pulled straight from the well-worn union-busting playbook outlined in Martin Levitt’s mea culpa, Confessions of A Union-Buster, these excellent episodes of media-criticism podcast Citations Needed, a website maintained by the Communications Workers of America literally called UnionBustingPlaybook.com, and countless other media.
If Weaver—whose personal net worth is estimated by Forbes at $480 million, and whose husband is an executive vice-president at Sony Pictures—has evidence to substantiate her accusation that a ruinous Teamsters contract was the driving force in RNDC's CA collapse, she doesn’t cite it in her video. Which is a shame, because that would be pretty newsworthy, and I would certainly like to review it. I've contacted Uncle Nearest to request the source of her contention that RNDC used "mob-style negotiating tactics" to put RNDC in a supposed $100 million-per-year hole, and to request an interview with Weaver. I’ve also contacted the Teamsters for comment; spokesperson Matt McQuaid called me from the road to confirm my request, and signaled the union intended to respond to Weaver’s claims. Stay tuned.
I’ll be filing more on this story next week. In the meantime, here’s the full transcript of Weaver’s screed:
Most people know the mob built the city I’m in right now. What they don’t know is that the unions bankrolled it. The unions used to be synonymous with the mob. Are they any different now, or do they just have better publicists? This is Night Cap with Fawn Weaver, where I take hot topics, strip away the drama, the politics, I add truth, history and a little bit of hope. Serve straight up, no chaser.
Right now I'm just moments from Caesar’s Palace, funded with over $20 million from the Teamsters’ pension fund. That's nearly $200 million in today's dollars. Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, arguably the most powerful labor leader in American history, he was honored in the Presidential Suite on opening night. By the ‘70s, the Teamsters weren't just powerful. They were the largest creditor in the entire state of Nevada. But here's the part nobody likes to talk about. That pension fund, it wasn't just union money. It was mob-managed money. Hoffa’s right hand, Allen Dorfman, was tied to the Chicago outfit. Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran—yes, the one De Niro played in the movie—wasn't just a mob enforcer, he was a high-ranking Teamsters official. Tony Provenzano, a Genovese capo? He was both a union leader and a mob enforcer. So yeah, Vegas got built on some questionable capital.
Now let's fast forward to California 2025. RNDC, the second-largest spirits distributor in the US, is shutting down operations there. 2500 families are losing an income. Why? They were losing nearly 100 million [dollars] a year because of union labor costs they couldn't sustain. Another major distributor in California is reportedly losing over 75 million [dollars] a year because they've started matching union scale wages and benefits to keep the union from organizing their workforce. Meanwhile, the ones profiting? The ones not unionized. So one has to ask the question: are unions still good for American workers?
And look, I'm not here to say whether they're good or bad. During the Gilded Age, when steel mills were death traps and child labor was the norm, unions were absolutely necessary. Today, I don’t know. What I do know is this. The Teamsters once used their power to build an empire. Now that same model may be tearing one down. And the question becomes: have the unions left those mob-style negotiation tactics behind, or just repackage them in better PR? Because you can't claim to protect workers while bankrupting the very companies that employ them. You can't call it progress if it is not sustainable. But here's the hope. We've reinvented broken systems before. We've seen labor and leadership sit on opposite sides of the table and still find common ground. It won't be easy, but if the goal is sustainability, not control, then maybe, just maybe, we can build something better. They call me the People’s CEO, and I got just a few sips of Uncle Nearest left before I got to go catch a flight. So I'll see you next time.
Reply