Canadian among fired workers from Grand Theft Auto studio says they just want their jobs back

The firing of several employees at the makers of the Grand Theft Auto video games came as a complete surprise, according to one of the Canadian workers who was let go this past fall.

"I had no idea what was going on. I was shell-shocked," said one of three game developers fired from Rockstar Toronto (actually in Oakville, Ont.). CBC News is not naming the developer out of fear of retaliation, including being blacklisted from future employment in the games industry.

Thirty-one Rockstar employees working in the U.K. were fired the same day. Rockstar Games, which has multiple studios, primarily in the U.S., and U.K., alleges they were fired for "gross misconduct," and leaking company secrets.

Alex Marshall, president of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB), called the firings "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry."

It's the latest lightning rod for discussion about unionization in a hugely profitable, international industry that has historically been very resistant to it — even amidst reports of employees being burned out by unpaid overtime, and thousands of layoffs in recent years.

The employee told CBC News that on Oct. 30, three workers at Rockstar Toronto were each "brought into a room with an HR person" and told they were being terminated for breaking a non-disclosure agreement, which every employee must sign before working there.

"They ended up just giving us our essentials and ... we were immediately escorted out of the building by security."

CBC News reached out to Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar's parent company, for comment on the fired Canadian developers but received no response.

Nasr Ahmed, staff organizer at Communications Workers of America (CWA) Canada, was part of a small solidarity march outside Rockstar Toronto's offices earlier in December. He called Rockstar's claims of the fired workers leaking confidential information "patently false."

"They have not provided any proof for those claims, either for the Canadian workers or the U.K. workers," he said.

He corroborated an account from the IWGB that all 34 workers were part of an online discussion group on the app Discord, where industry workers interested in unionizing or learning about unions in the U.K. could talk about working conditions.

The fired employee told CBC News that the workers were from different departments and had different seniorities across the company, both in Canada and the U.K., and that "the only common link among us" was they were all part of the Discord group. CBC News has not viewed chat messages from the Discord group and could not verify their contents.

"At the end of the day ... discussing your working conditions is not against the law, as far as I know, in either Canada or the U.K., which is what exactly these workers were doing," Ahmed said.

Ahmed characterized Rockstar management's actions as "shameful." He says it creates "a chilling effect" that will discourage employees in the wider games industry from discussing working conditions and joining or forming a union.