The employment tribunal over Rockstar’s mass firing of GTA 6 developers has produced its most striking detail yet: according to the fired workers’ own legal filing, the company had an informant embedded inside their union’s private Discord server for the better part of two years before anyone was let go.

What the filing alleges

The claimants’ submission to the Glasgow Tribunals Centre identifies an employee, referenced in filings as RD/p.2535, who began reporting on activity inside the union Discord to Charlie Kinloch — Rockstar’s HR manager and co-studio operations director — from at least February 2024. Over the roughly 21 months that followed, the filing says, “at least 26 meetings or communications” took place between Kinloch and the informant, with Kinloch himself initiating close to half of them. The informant reportedly supplied screenshots and recordings from the server, briefed Kinloch on union meetings and training sessions, passed along membership and recruitment numbers, and identified specific union activists by name. A second employee, cited as RD/p.2548, is alleged to have “facilitated further monitoring” and supplied additional documentation later on.

The timeline the union says matters most

The filing ties the surveillance directly to the firings’ timing. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain crossed the 10% membership threshold required under UK law to apply for statutory recognition on October 18, 2025. According to the claimants, the informant flagged a sharp jump in union recruitment to Kinloch just two days later, on October 20, and again on October 22. Rockstar began taking legal advice shortly after, and on October 30 — twelve days after the recognition threshold was cleared — the company dismissed 34 workers, informing office staff in short in-person meetings and remote employees over phone calls that reportedly lasted about two minutes before their access was cut.

How this fits Rockstar’s defense

Rockstar has maintained throughout the case that the October dismissals were a response to a genuine confidentiality breach — specifically, Discord discussions the company says leaked unannounced details about GTA 6, including an internally tested 32-player online format that surfaced in court filings earlier this month. The union has argued from the start that the confidentiality rationale is a pretext for suppressing an organizing drive, and has separately accused Rockstar of blacklisting workers over their union involvement. The mole allegation, now part of the evidentiary record at a hearing that opened September 10 and is scheduled to run through October 16, gives that argument a specific, documented mechanism: not a company reacting to a leak it happened to discover, but one allegedly tracking a union campaign’s growth in real time through a paid channel inside the campaign itself.

Rockstar has not, in reporting so far, offered a detailed public response to the mole allegation specifically, though it has said throughout the case that it “stand[s] by [its] course of action” on the firings themselves. The tribunal has not yet ruled on any of the claims, and an earlier attempt by the fired workers to win interim relief — pay while the case proceeded — was denied in January after a judge found they hadn’t cleared the legal bar required at that preliminary stage.

Why it matters beyond one tribunal

Whatever the tribunal ultimately decides, the filing puts a concrete shape on an allegation that’s easy to make and hard to prove in most labor disputes: that a company was surveilling organizing activity rather than simply responding to it after the fact. A named HR executive, a documented cadence of dozens of meetings, and a two-day window between crossing a legal recognition threshold and getting reported on are the kind of specifics that move a dispute from “the union says” to something a judge has to weigh directly. With GTA 6 due November 19 and Rockstar’s labor practices already shadowing the countdown to launch, this is the detail most likely to keep the case in the news through the rest of the hearing.

For the background on how the firings and tribunal got here, see our coverage of the employment tribunal over the 31 fired GTA 6 developers. And for another detail that surfaced through the same court filings, read about the 32-player GTA 6 Online format revealed in Rockstar’s own submissions.