SUMMARYWorkers at Rockstar North in Scotland and other Rockstar Games offices in the UK formally announced a union on Thursday through the Independent Workers of Great Britain. The move follows more than 30 firings in October 2025 that employees and union organizers say were retaliation for organizing activity, while the company cited confidential-information violations. The dispute has drawn protests, legal action, and criticism from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Rockstar Games has a 2,000-employee studio in Scotland called Rockstar North. And Thursday its workers announced they'd formed a union, reports the gaming news site Aftermath:
The union [part of the wider Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union] includes workers from Rockstar Games offices in Leeds, London, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Lincoln, the Rockstar Games Workers Union said in a YouTube video published on Thursday... Last year, Rockstar Games employees told Aftermath that the company's insistence on return-to-office policies was a problem for many workers.
Rockstar Games, for its part, claimed the policies were related to productivity and security concerns... The video posted Thursday outlines what happened over the past several months, starting with the firing of more than 30 Rockstar Games employees in October 2025 for what the company said was "discussing confidential information in a public forum," a Rockstar Games spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg in November. The union disagreed: It said at the time that the workers were gathered in a private Discord server with employees and union organizers - the beginnings of the union announced Thursday. The IWGB is working to fight the firings in court.
Workers and outside union supporters gathered globally after the employees were fired, in front of Rockstar Games' offices, to protest what the union called union busting by Rockstar Games... "We believe the [firings] were unlawful and retaliatory - connected to the workers' collective activity of organizing at Rockstar," IWGB Game Workers Union co-founder Austin Kelmore told Aftermath at the time. "This action by Rockstar came shortly after reaching 10 percent of eligible workers at Rockstar in the union...." [10% is the threshhold for legal recognition by the U.K. government.] The workers have received support from government officials; in December, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the firings of the unionizing workers "a deeply concerning case."