Rockstar has been accused of union busting, but the company says the fired employees were "distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum"
Official internal chat will be either Slack or MS Teams. Using any unauthorised app to discuss matters relating to the business would be a contract violation.
Realistically, game devs do this all the time in private chats with colleagues that happen outside work, both online and in person. But of course R* either never knows about those or chooses to overlook it.
In this case, I suspect the fact they were unionising was the reason they actually took action on it. It’s not about consistency, it’s about having an excuse to fire these people.
Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.
And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”
As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.
But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.
Official internal chat will be either Slack or MS Teams. Using any unauthorised app to discuss matters relating to the business would be a contract violation.
Realistically, game devs do this all the time in private chats with colleagues that happen outside work, both online and in person. But of course R* either never knows about those or chooses to overlook it.
In this case, I suspect the fact they were unionising was the reason they actually took action on it. It’s not about consistency, it’s about having an excuse to fire these people.
If you are organizing a union NEVER EVER use company controlled channels to communicate about it. This is organizing 101.
At the same time, make sure that whatever you do use is private and secure. Union reps will warn you about how companies spy, and it is not paranoia.
Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.
And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”
As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.
But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.