GTA 6 developers fired by Rockstar last year on the charge of leaking information about the upcoming game have been denied interim relief, as they and their allies at the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain begin their legal case against the company for alleged union-busting.
Interim relief is a legal mechanism whereby dismissed employees get short-term emergency financial help from their employer. The IWGB requested last week that a UK employment tribunal grant interim relief to 31 fired Rockstar employees. Had the request been granted, the ousted workers would have been put back on Rockstar’s payroll and had any cancelled work visas reinstated.
Naturally, Rockstar are interpreting the rejection as supporting their case that the workers were fired for sharing info about GTA 6 and other unannounced projects over Discord, rather than because they were trying to unionise. A spokesperson has told IGN that the judge’s decision “is consistent with Rockstar’s position throughout.”
The IWGB, meanwhile, argue that obtaining interim relief was always going to be “an incredibly high bar to meet”, and that the setback “does nothing to dampen our hopes of winning justice when the full hearing takes place”. They call attention to employment judge Frances Eccles’s ruling that “there was no evidence of the respondent having suffered any adverse consequences as a result of these postings” [on Discord].
As reported by IGN and Bloomberg, the hearing includes a little more from either side about what exactly happened on the union organiser Discord channel in question, though this is just a preliminary procedure – the bulk of claims and evidence are to follow when the case goes to court.
According to the ruling from Eccles, over half of the roughly 350 members of the Discord were members of the IWGB, but some were no longer employed by Rockstar. One of the channel’s members is said to have written articles about video games, including one about Rockstar and GTA.
To give some background on that latter allegation, Rockstar “indicated” to IGN back in December that one member of the Discord was a game journalist, while another was an employee of a rival developer. Rockstar has claimed that moderators were not aware of the identities of every member of the channel, creating a security risk.
IWGB communications officer Jake Thomas has countered that all members of the Discord were either union staff or officials or Rockstar employees, with moderators removing members after learning that they had left the company. Thomas did, however, concede that one union official present in the channel had previously written “a couple of articles for a paper, but is a game worker and union rep and was in the group in that capacity.”
Rockstar have yet to say much about the nature of the “confidential information” allegedly being shared, though IGN report that it’s a mixture of “specific game features, comments on the overall progress of GTA 6 development, timelines to launch, and company IT security protocols” – all details Rockstar believe could damage parent company Take-Two Interactive’s share price, if they were made public. Some of these claims have been corroborated by other sources. In November, an anonymous Rockstar insider claimed to People Make Games that the firings followed a discussion of changes to the company’s internal Slack policy.
Judge Eccles also notes in her ruling about interim relief that, besides the 31 people let go in the UK, Rockstar dismissed three employees in Canada who were not members of the union. As such, she argues that their union membership could not have been a factor in their dismissal.
The fired developers are represented by Lord John Hendy KC – who, yes, is an actual Lord in the House of Lords. Among other things, he argued in the hearing that no information had actually been leaked to the press and public, and that it is not in itself “gross misconduct” (as Rockstar has previously stated) to share confidential information in a group containing external third parties.
The IWGB have released a statement in response to the tribunal ruling. It claims that the hearing has revealed “that many procedural guidelines were broken in the process of firing these employees, including there being no disciplinary meetings, no chance for appeal until six weeks later, and no evidence of an investigation. Comments relied on by Rockstar’s lawyers were obtained without the knowledge of employees using Discord, described by the claimants as ‘covert monitoring.’”
The IWGB also argue that “[r]ather than focusing their case on evidence that Rockstar acted fairly and reasonably in their decision to fire 31 people on the spot, the argument resided largely on legal technicalities, with Rockstar’s lawyers declaring that it doesn’t matter if the dismissals were unfair, or if the leadership that dismissed them acted with malice.”
The dismissal of the Rockstar workers has sparked protest action outside Take-Two Interactive’s offices in London and Rockstar North’s headquarters in Edinburgh. It has also been raised in Parliament, with prime minister Keir Starmer calling it “a deeply concerning case”.
