It’s almost never a good thing when someone loses their job. The sting goes even further when you feel that you lost your job in an unjustified way. Whether it’s corruption at the top, a misunderstanding gone too far, or even personal bias, when you’ve been wronged, you want to speak out about it. As we’ve been reporting for the last few days, Rockstar Games is having a bit of a scandal right now. No, not because of the game they just delayed, though that didn’t help matters, but because of the 30+ people they let go across two different branches of the company.
In the UK, all the members who were let go were part of a union. Thus, the claim of “Union-Busting” has been made. While Rockstar Games has denied that, claiming that everyone who was let go were “leakers,” not everyone is buying that. As a result of this, there were protests yesterday at the UK branch of the company, and Rock Paper Shotgun was there to talk with some of the people and see what their take on it was.
Many were afraid to speak out officially and be named due to potential legal issues and retaliation, which is why some made anonymous posts online, but a few did give some thoughts through union speakers, including stating that within Rockstar itself, “everyone’s been shell-shocked as to what’s happened.”
That’s easy to imagine, too, as many of these people were close colleagues, including ones who had been there for years, and then they were fired without the chance to defend themselves, based on the accounts given so far.
Things go even further, though, as one of the fired people admitted that they hadn’t even been in the union for that long:
“I joined sort of out of fear of what might go wrong, where people’s jobs might be on the line, an employer might have unreasonable work expectations of employees, and I joined the union to have some protection against that because I didn’t feel like that was the sort of thing that I could work through with the employer directly.”
Many other statements given to Rock Paper Shotgun mimicked that, and noted how no one in Rockstar allowed for legal representation, which the now-fired employees were required to have, and that many other UK laws were violated, which is why the union group is preparing to sue Rockstar for what happened.
We’ll keep following this story as it develops.
