A judge today ruled against forcing Rockstar to pay out interim relief to the 34 GTA 6 developers it fired in October, dealing the first major legal blow to the former employees and the union representing them.
The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) pressed the Glasgow Employment Tribunal for emergency financial relief earlier this month, then accusing Rockstar of "brutal union busting." Today a UK judge denied that request, saying it's unlikely the firings were due to union activity.
Despite this setback for the IWGB, the legal battle over the fired employees is likely to continue. In a statement to GamesRadar+, an IWGB spokesperson said the judge's decision "is disappointing but does nothing to dampen our hopes of winning justice when the full hearing takes place."
The spokesperson added, "we are emerging from this hearing, having now had a glimpse of Rockstar's flimsy grounds for defence, feeling bolstered in our claims that these firings were not just deeply unjust but also plainly unlawful. The judge stated in her ruling that: 'There was no evidence of the respondent having suffered any adverse consequences as a result of these postings'.
In its own statement sent to GamesRadar+, a Rockstar spokesperson said, predictably, that the company is happy with the judge's ruling.
"The Glasgow Employment Tribunal has rejected the union's application for interim relief. We welcome the decision, which is consistent with Rockstar's position throughout," the spokesperson said. "We regret that we were put in a position where dismissals were necessary, but we stand by our course of action as supported by the outcome of this hearing."
Rockstar has said it fired the employees not because of anything union-related, but because they were leaking confidential information via a Discord set up by the IWGB, a claim the union has refuted, saying the former employees were only talking about working conditions.
According to the judge in charge of the case, there were 350 people in the IWGB's Discord channel, and about half of them were union members. The judge also commented that, at the time of the firings, some were no longer Rockstar employees and that one was a video game journalist who had previously reported on the company. Another reason for her ruling, the judge noted, was the fact that three of the 34 fired employees were based in Canada and thus were not union members. It's worth noting that the rest were union members at the time of firing.
In its statement today, the IWGB claimed Rockstar management had been secretly monitoring the union's private Discord. It also said that the Discord members Rockstar claimed were journalists and competitors were union officials and employees who had recently left the company and were still bound by the same non-disclosure agreements as then-current employees. The union further stated that it didn't find evidence of an official Rockstar investigation into the purported leaks and claimed the studio never imposed disciplinary actions on the alleged offenders, nor offered them the chance to appeal, before they were fired.
"We have always been clear that Interim Relief is an incredibly high bar to meet as a temporary measure before the substantive tribunal, and it would have been almost unprecedented for a Judge to award this to a group of this size," reads the IWGB's statement.
"That we did not secure an interim relief order means the especially stringent conditions required for this kind of hearing were not met, but does nothing to suggest that Rockstar will not be found guilty of unfair dismissal when the case goes to trial."
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