More time for questioning
The employment tribunal between the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and GTA 6 maker Rockstar games was due to conclude this Friday, but the legal case has now been extended into November.
It's like everything Rockstar touches gets delayed…
According to Chris Bratt, who broke the news on Bluesky, lawyers for both the IWGB and Rockstar will use the time to continue crossexamining current and former staff. The union are concluding their questioning of Rockstar leadership this week, and the judge on the case has granted additional time for Rockstar's legal team to ask questions of the fired employees.
With the extension, closing arguments will now take place on November 17th and 18th, just days ahead of GTA 6's release.
However, while the two sides will have submitted all their evidence by that point and made their final arguments, we will still be waiting on the judge to make their ruling and decide whether Rockstar broke the law when it fired staff in late 2025.
At the centre of the case is a dispute between the cause of the firings. Rockstar claim the staff are guilty of committing "gross misconduct", while the laid-off employees claim the company was trying to prevent staff from forming a union.
The workers were all members of a Discord server that was launched to organise unionisation efforts, but Rockstar claim this server was unsecure and staff were sharing confidential information. The IWGB lawyers dispute this.
One revelation from the tribunal is that a junior employee was feeding information from the Discord server to Rockstar's HR director Charlie Kinloch for more than two and a half years. This allegedly included the news that, October 18th 2026, union membership had passed the statutory membership threshold for legal recognition. Less than two weeks later, the workers were fired.
In the year since the staff were laid off, workers have organised the necessary 10% of members to form a union.