Rockstar Union Trial Opens With a Dispute Over an Informant
The employment tribunal over Rockstar’s October 2025 dismissals opened on September 10 at the Glasgow Tribunals Centre and is listed to run until October 16 — finishing about five weeks before Grand Theft Auto VI ships. The first days produced the detail that will likely define the case: both sides’ filings describe an employee who passed information out of the workers’ private union chat to Rockstar’s HR department for more than two years. They disagree entirely about what to call that person.
The claimants call it a mole. Rockstar calls it a whistleblower. Nothing has been decided — a tribunal makes its findings at the end, not in week one — but the factual overlap is unusual, and it narrows what the hearing is actually about.
What the two sides agree on
Agreement between opposing filings is worth isolating, because it is the part least likely to evaporate under cross-examination.
Both accounts accept that a junior employee had access to the union’s private Discord and relayed what happened there to management, and that this continued for a long stretch before anyone was dismissed. Rockstar’s own filing describes three individuals who raised concerns about the server, one of whom had been passing information along for over two and a half years. The claimants’ account puts the start at around February 2024 and says the employee supplied screenshots, recordings, meeting details and membership numbers to HR manager Charlie Kinloch — at least 26 contacts across 21 months, roughly half of them initiated by Kinloch.
The disagreement is about character and purpose. Were these staff reporting a genuine security problem to their employer, or was this surveillance of a union in formation? That question is the case.
The numbers, which reporting has muddled
Different figures circulate because they count different things.
| Figure | What it refers to |
|---|---|
| 31 | UK-based IWGB members dismissed — the claimants in this tribunal |
| 3 | Workers dismissed in Canada, outside this tribunal’s jurisdiction |
| 34 | Total dismissals Rockstar made in the same action |
| October 30, 2025 | The date the dismissals began |
Rockstar draws an argument from the Canadian three: it says they were dismissed for comparable conduct without being union members, which it offers as evidence that union activity was not the trigger. The claimants’ answer is that the UK dismissals cluster around union leadership rather than around conduct.
Why the timing argument matters most
The claimants’ strongest available argument is a calendar. Under UK law a union needs 10 percent membership in a workplace before it can seek statutory recognition — the legal right to be bargained with. According to the claimants’ filing, the informant told Kinloch in early October 2025 that the union was still short of that line; the union announced it had crossed the threshold on October 18; information reached Kinloch again on October 20 and 22; managers received termination lists on October 29; the dismissals began on October 30.
If the tribunal accepts that sequence as causal, it is close to the definition of blacklisting the union has been arguing for since the strike-out attempt failed — compiling information about workers because of union activity in order to act against them. Those claims survived Rockstar’s attempt to remove them, which is what the tribunal decided in July. If the tribunal reads the sequence as coincidence layered on a real security concern, Rockstar’s gross-misconduct case stands.
Rockstar’s case
Rockstar’s position has not moved: the dismissals were for gross misconduct, specifically the sharing of confidential company information and what its filing calls openly disparaging conduct about managers. “Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity,” the company has said.
Its secrecy argument leans on scale. The filing compares protecting the game’s design to Apple protecting the iPhone, and describes a server structure it says it could not audit: a committee channel, a members’ channel, and a much larger room with hundreds of participants using pseudonyms. Rockstar’s contention is that it could not know who was reading — a claim it is making against a union that says it knows exactly who its members are.
What this does and does not tell you about the game
Very little, directly. No date, edition or feature is at stake here, and another delay remains unlikely on the evidence that actually bears on it. The tribunal’s schedule does mean five weeks of testimony about Rockstar’s internal conduct will land in the middle of the launch campaign, alongside a separate legal track in which Take-Two is pursuing subpoenas over the leak of GTA 6 material.
It is also worth repeating what the dismissed workers themselves have said about that overlap: they have asked people not to boycott the game they spent years building. Separately, the union’s recognition campaign continues as a negotiation — it reached a first meeting with management in July — and progress there settles nothing in Glasgow.
Thousands of pages of evidence are still to be heard. This page updates when the tribunal reaches findings.