Glasgow tribunal filings detail Rockstar HR's 21-month contact with 'mole' on UK union Discord

The October 2025 dismissals of 34 UK Rockstar workers are now contextualised by tribunal filings in Glasgow that put a name, a duration and a content list on the relationship between Rockstar HR and a Discord-based informant. The filings say HR director Charlie Kinloch received information about IWGB Game Workers union activity from a junior employee from at least February 2024, including screenshots, recordings, meeting notes and the names of individual activists. Rockstar's own filing acknowledges the relationship but reframes the informant as one of three 'whistleblowers' who acted on security grounds. The semantic gap between 'mole' and 'whistleblower' is doing real work in the case: the first framing implies surveillance of protected activity, the second implies a duty-of-care intervention.

The filings sketch what an HR-led informant channel costs on both sides of the table. On the company side it consumed roughly 26 meetings or communications over 21 months, with about half initiated by Kinloch, and culminated in VP of information security Abid Ansari signing in to download the contents of the Announcements and General channels before the dismissals began. On the worker side it produced a 34-person mass dismissal, the loss of the server as an organising space, and an employment-tribunal counter-suit arguing the firings were timed to deny statutory recognition rather than to plug a leak. The asymmetry matters: the company retained its management structure and product pipeline, while the workers absorbed the legal, financial and reputational burden of challenging it through tribunal.

Three factual disputes will carry most of the weight at the hearing. First, whether the Discord was effectively walled off: the workers describe an invite-only server with Slack-verified moderators and a waiting room, while Rockstar argues content was vulnerable to phishing, device theft and disgruntled-user leaks. Second, whether confidential information actually left the server: the workers state 'no confidential information is known to have leaked from the Server into the public domain,' while Rockstar points to the informant's own behaviour as evidence that content did, in fact, move. Third, what triggered the dismissals - security concerns, or the union's approach to the recognition threshold - since the filings place the informant's 7 October membership-count report within days of the firings and the union's 18 October threshold crossing.

For engineers building worker-facing communication tools, the case documents a specific failure mode in which an insider with legitimate access becomes a long-running source for management, and the resulting intelligence eventually drives access by senior security staff. The IWGB Discord used invite gating, Slack-backed identity verification and channel-tier separation between general members and a committee-only room, and yet according to the filings Rockstar reached the Announcements and General channels before the dismissals while only obtaining committee-channel contents later through a court-ordered disclosure on 3 August. The implicit lesson is that procedural controls on entry do not, by themselves, prevent traffic-analysis-style monitoring by an insider, and that 'the server did not leak to the public' is a narrow defence when the company itself gains read access through a co-opted member.