Inside the Salary Spreadsheet That Got Four Engineers Illegally Fired | Vermont Information Processing

The Non-Financial Ledger

Christopher Bendel found out he was fired while his computer was still logged in. VIP disabled his accounts at 11:32 a.m. and had him terminated by noon, about ninety minutes after two of his managers sat down to look at a spreadsheet he’d built the day before. He didn’t get a warning, a meeting, or a chance to explain. He got locked out.

The three coworkers who lost their jobs alongside him, Gordon Dragoon, Kaleb Noble, and Kestrel Swift, found out the next day, after a company IT director combed through their private chat messages and handed them to management. Those messages showed people venting about a coworker’s firing and joking darkly about their jobs. That venting became the evidence used to fire them.

Two years before any of this happened, Kestrel Swift wrote in a performance review that VIP would “fire me without remorse the second it doesn’t think it can squeeze more money out of me.” Company leadership dug that sentence back up and used it to help justify firing her. She was right, and the record proves it.

Legal Receipts

“[VIP’s Chief Financial Officer] believed that the spreadsheet was ‘not appropriate,’ ‘not accurate,’ and ‘serve[d] no purpose.'”

• This is the executive reasoning that triggered the entire chain of firings: a company officer’s personal opinion that a pay-comparison spreadsheet was pointless.
• The court separately found the spreadsheet was not “materially inaccurate,” meaning the CFO’s stated reason for objecting to it didn’t hold up.
• The company disabled the spreadsheet and began discussing Bendel’s termination based largely on this reaction.

McGinty cited Bendel’s “feeling towards VIP” and his “attitude,” particularly “towards the restructuring and how he … was uninterested in partaking in that.”

• This is what VIP’s Director of Development actually told Bendel to his face when firing him: attitude and feelings, not misconduct.
• In litigation, VIP later argued it fired Bendel for disrupting the restructuring, misusing IT resources, and spreading a misleading document, none of which matches what he was told at the time.
• The court cited these “shifting explanations” as evidence of retaliation.

“VIP will fire me without remorse the second it doesn’t think it can squeeze more money out of me tha[n] it pays me. Why would I be loyal? This is a loveless exchange of labor for currency between two mutually selfish parties.”

• Kestrel Swift wrote this in a performance review two years before her termination, describing her honest read of her employment relationship.
• Company leadership retrieved this old review and cited it, alongside her group chat messages, as a reason to fire her.
• An employee’s private opinion about the nature of employment became part of the record used against her.

The Board relied “on [VIP’s] shifting explanations for Bendel’s discharge as … evidence of animus towards his protected concerted activity.”

• This is the federal labor board’s own conclusion: VIP’s story kept changing, and that change in story is itself evidence the company was punishing protected activity.
• The appeals court agreed, finding “substantial evidence” supported this conclusion.
• It is a direct finding that VIP’s own account of its decision-making could not be trusted.

Public Deception

Right after firing four employees connected to a salary-sharing spreadsheet, VIP management told the rest of the staff a very different story about the company’s values than the one it had just enforced.

• What was claimed: Immediately after the four terminations, Director McGinty held an all-staff meeting and “emphasized that employees remained free to share salary information.”
• What actually happened: VIP had, less than 24 hours earlier, fired the four employees most responsible for creating and spreading exactly that kind of salary information.
• What was claimed: VIP told Bendel he was fired over his “feeling towards VIP” and his “attitude” toward the restructuring.
• What actually happened: In court, VIP abandoned that explanation and offered new ones, resource misuse, disruption, a “misleading” document, that the appeals court found were not supported by the record and were used as pretext.

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality

This case is fundamentally about who gets to know what a job actually pays, and what happens to workers who find out and talk about it.

• Bendel and a coworker discovered a $8,000 pay gap between two people doing similar software engineering work the moment they compared salaries, information neither had access to before.
• A spreadsheet note, which the court found was a legitimate opinion and not a false statement, flagged that 100 percent of participating developers considered themselves underpaid relative to their peers.
• Around 25 employees added their own salary data within a day, showing how much pent-up demand existed for basic pay transparency that management had never provided.
• The company’s response to that transparency effort was to fire the four employees who built it, a message that risks chilling future wage discussions among the remaining staff.

This Is the System Working as Intended

Even where a federal court found VIP broke the law, the legal process itself let most of the company’s conduct slide by on a technicality, and a sitting appellate judge argued the one worker who won should get less than full compensation.

• Of the four workers found by the trial judge to have been illegally fired, only one, Bendel, had his win upheld on appeal. The other three lost their victory not because the evidence changed, but because the labor board described the protected conduct too broadly in its final ruling.
• That means Dragoon, Noble, and Swift are sent back to square one, four years after they were fired, to relitigate whether their firings were illegal.
• A dissenting judge argued that even Bendel, the one clear winner, should not be entitled to full compensation for the “direct or foreseeable pecuniary harms” his illegal firing caused him, calling that remedy unauthorized.
• The case took over four years to reach a decision, from the February 2022 firing to the May 2026 ruling, and it still is not fully resolved for three of the four workers.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

This case exposes a system where a company can fire workers within ninety minutes of learning they compared paychecks, and still walk away with three of the four firings unresolved because of how a government complaint was worded.

What Now?

The National Labor Relations Board is the agency with direct authority over this case, and it is where accountability for the three still-unresolved firings will be decided next.

• Watchlist: National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency now handling the remanded cases of Dragoon, Noble, and Swift.
• If you work somewhere without transparent pay, know that sharing your own salary with coworkers is protected activity under federal labor law, regardless of what your employer’s handbook implies.
• Document everything in writing if you organize a salary-sharing effort at work: what you built, who you shared it with, and any reaction from management, in case you need it later.
• Support coworkers who raise pay transparency questions instead of staying quiet; this case shows retaliation can happen within the same hour information starts circulating.