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Rockstar's deleted Slack channels put an unofficial Discord at the centre of a Glasgow tribunal
Dayne Oram told an employment tribunal he believes a 2023 return-to-office petition became the basis of an internal watch list. Rockstar says the dismissals followed the sharing of confidential company information.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Rockstar removed several non-work Slack channels it considered a "distraction", and the backlash from staff played out in an unofficial Discord server instead.
- Dayne Oram, who helped set up that server for roughly 300 Rockstar employees, was among 34 workers dismissed by Rockstar North in October 2025.
- Oram told an employment tribunal in Glasgow that he believes closer monitoring of staff began with a petition against a return-to-office mandate.
- The hearing, overseen by judge Lucy Wiseman, is expected to run for around six weeks.
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Why it matters
- constraint Closing the social channels cost Rockstar sight of where the talking went. The material it eventually investigated sat on a server Rockstar did not host, and it reached management only because a member of that server carried it there.
- decision Any team planning to prune non-work channels in a company tool now has a worked example of the destination problem: the place the conversation lands can become both the employer's evidence and the employee's defence.
- exposure The unpaid moderators of unofficial staff servers carry personal risk. Oram is defending at tribunal how much policing he owed an employer inside a space staff had set up themselves.
- contradiction Oram traces the alleged monitoring to a petition most of whose signatories held no union card, while Rockstar denies any union motive, so the IWGB has to connect a largely non-union petition to union detriment.
The step that turned an argument about chat channels into dismissals, on Rockstar's own account, was a copy and paste. The company says employees copied internal emails about the Slack changes into the Discord server, and that a member of that server later approached management, prompting an investigation [8].
Oram dates the trouble earlier than the emails. Around 150 employees signed the return-to-office petition in spring 2023, according to The Herald, and only 15 to 20 of them were union members [5]. "I believe this forms the basis of a watch list of people to keep an eye on for further activities," he told the tribunal [9]. On those numbers, union members were between 10% and 13% of the signatories, so roughly 130 people signed without a union card [1].
A Rockstar spokesperson said its position "has been clear and consistent throughout" [10]. "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," they said [11], adding: "We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously" [12].
Some messages on the server referred to a specific manager using a slur and described managers as "cowardly corporate f****" [13]. Rockstar's representative pressed Oram on whether that would amount to gross misconduct. "It would be misconduct. I disagree it would be gross misconduct," Oram said, adding: "We were human admins trying to keep the line without over-policing" [14][15].
Teams tell themselves that closing the non-work channels removes a distraction [6]. What users do is keep talking, in a place outside the company's systems and its records, moderated by colleagues doing it for free [7]. The forcing question before a cleanup has two halves: where the conversation goes next, and who moderates it there. When the answers are a consumer chat app and a volunteer, the company has swapped a logged channel for one where a single pasted email becomes a confidentiality investigation.
Of the 31 Scotland-based workers who lost their jobs, the IWGB represents 23 [4], leaving eight who are not part of its case [2]. GTA 6 is due on November 19, and the union wants official recognition from Rockstar before the game ships [17].
What to watch
- Whether the tribunal accepts that any watch list of petition signatories existed inside Rockstar.
- Whether the IWGB secures recognition from Rockstar before GTA 6 ships on November 19.
- Whether the eight dismissed Scotland-based workers outside the IWGB case bring claims of their own.