A jury of Thomas Cole’s peers looked at what Foxmar Inc. did to him and decided the company deserved a $3 million punishment — and then the legal system spent years finding ways to give almost all of it back.

Vermont ✦ Labor Rights ✦ Corporate Retaliation ✦ November 2025

Your Boss Fired You for Getting Sick. Then the Courts Helped Him Keep the Money.

The Non-Financial Ledger

They Came for His Paycheck. Then They Came for His Lawyer.

Thomas Cole went to work. He tried to exercise rights that Vermont legislators wrote into law specifically to protect people like him: the right to workplace safety under VOSHA, and the right to use earned sick time under VESTA. These are the most basic protections a working person can have. Foxmar Inc., his employer, punished him for it. A jury of his peers looked at the evidence and agreed — Foxmar retaliated against Cole, and Foxmar deserved to pay.

The first jury delivered a verdict that actually meant something: $3,215,943 total, including a $3 million punitive damages award. That is the legal system working as designed. Punitive damages exist for one reason only — to send a message to corporations that some conduct is so wrong, so deliberate, so contemptuous of workers’ basic rights, that a simple repayment of lost wages is not enough. The jury said to Foxmar: this was not a mistake. This was intentional. Pay up.

Foxmar’s lawyers went back to court and asked for a do-over on damages. They got it. At the second trial, the punitive damages evaporated entirely. Cole walked away with $55,000 — enough, perhaps, to cover a year’s rent in Vermont, but nowhere near a punishment for a company that chose to retaliate against a worker exercising his legal rights. The message sent to the next worker thinking about taking their employer to court was clear: the first verdict was not real. The second one is what actually happens.

Then the fight over legal fees began. Cole’s attorney requested $240,536.75 (roughly the cost of sending two kids to a state university for four years) — fees that Vermont law explicitly says the losing defendant owes when workers win retaliation claims. The court cut that by 55%. The judge’s reasoning, later ruled illegal by the appeals court, was essentially: Cole only got $55,000 in damages, so paying his lawyer more than that seems like too much. That logic, applied consistently, would make every worker’s rights law in Vermont unenforceable for anyone without money. If your claim is worth $55,000, and a lawyer cannot expect to recover fees proportionate to that, no lawyer takes your case. That is the quiet corporate victory buried inside a procedural ruling.

Cole spent years in litigation — multiple trials, an appeal to this circuit, and ultimately a second appeal just to recover the legal fees he was owed by law. The source documents do not record what that cost him in sleepless nights, in stress, in the grinding uncertainty of watching a legal system repeatedly find procedural reasons to return money to a corporation that a jury already condemned. But the record of his case — filed in 2018, still unresolved on attorney fees in 2025 — speaks for itself. Seven years. For a $55,000 verdict.

The harm here extends past Thomas Cole. Vermont passed VOSHA and VESTA because lawmakers understood that workers face retaliation every single day, and that most workers cannot afford to sue. Fee-shifting was the solution: force the lawbreaking employer to pay the legal bills, so workers with small-dollar claims can access attorneys. Foxmar, and its legal team, argued throughout this case that paying Cole’s lawyer was unreasonable because his damages were low. That argument, if adopted as law, would have surgically removed the enforcement mechanism from every Vermont worker protection statute. The appeals court stopped it. But Foxmar’s lawyers spent years and substantial resources trying to make it stick.

Legal Receipts

The Words They Cannot Take Back

“The whole purpose of fee-shifting statutes is to generate attorneys’ fees that are disproportionate to the plaintiff’s recovery.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Cole v. Foxmar, Inc., No. 24-3122 (Nov. 12, 2025), quoting Millea v. Metro-N. R.R. Co.

“A rule of proportionality would make it difficult, if not impossible, for individuals with meritorious civil rights claims but relatively small potential damages to obtain redress from the courts.” — U.S. Supreme Court, City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 578 (1986), cited in Cole v. Foxmar, Inc.

“An attorney does not receive a ‘windfall’ merely because the award of attorney’s fees is not proportionate to the award of damages.” — Vermont Supreme Court, L’Esperance v. Benware, 830 A.2d 675, 684 (Vt. 2003), cited in Cole v. Foxmar, Inc.

“Fee-shifting provisions like the ones in VESTA and VOSHA are designed for the precise purpose of facilitating access to attorneys for people whose claims may be worth less than the cost of representation.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Cole v. Foxmar, Inc., No. 24-3122 (Nov. 12, 2025)

“Even where no damages or other relief is awarded, or merely nominal damages are awarded, the purpose of a statutory fee-shifting provision may be served where the plaintiff has prevailed on a significant legal issue or accomplished some broader ‘public purpose’ underlying the legislation by exposing, for example, ‘lawless conduct’ or deterring future misconduct.” — Vermont Supreme Court, Anderson v. Johnson, 19 A.3d 86, 91 (Vt. 2011), cited in Cole v. Foxmar, Inc.

“The requirement that a fee award look reasonable to a rational paying client was just proportionality by another name and, thus, could not be determinative in a trial court’s reasonable fee decision under Vermont law.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Cole v. Foxmar, Inc., No. 24-3122 (Nov. 12, 2025)

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality: The Law Is Only as Good as Your Ability to Afford It

The most structurally damaging aspect of this case is the argument Foxmar’s legal team made and nearly won. The lower court agreed with them: if a worker’s damages are small, the lawyer’s fees should be small too. That sounds intuitive. It is also catastrophically wrong, and the appeals court said so explicitly. Vermont’s VOSHA and VESTA statutes were written with a fee-shifting provision precisely because wage theft, unsafe workplaces, and sick leave retaliation tend to involve relatively small dollar amounts per worker. The entire enforcement architecture depends on lawyers being able to recover full fees when workers win.

The appeals court cited a Vermont Supreme Court case where a fee award of over $55,000 (about one full year of the median Vermont worker’s income) was upheld even though the plaintiff’s damages were less than $8,000 (a month and a half of rent for the average Vermont household). It also cited a case where a fee award four times greater than the damages award was affirmed. These are the legal precedents that keep worker protection laws functional. Foxmar’s lawyers spent years trying to overturn them through procedural maneuvering in a single case. They came uncomfortably close.

Cole’s case took from 2018 to at least 2025 — seven years — to resolve the question of whether his lawyer would be paid. During those seven years, every other Vermont worker watching this case received the same message: winning is not enough. After the win, you fight for years over whether your lawyer gets paid. That message deters future cases. Deterred cases mean emboldened employers. Emboldened employers retaliate again. The cycle is self-reinforcing, and it costs workers far more than any single dollar figure can capture.

Public Health: Workers Who Cannot Report Safety Violations Get Hurt

VOSHA — the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Act — is the statute Cole used alongside VESTA. VOSHA exists because workplace injuries and deaths are not accidents in a vacuum; they are the predictable outcome of employers who cut corners on safety when there are no consequences. The retaliation protection in VOSHA’s Section 231 is the enforcement engine: workers must be safe to report violations without fear of losing their jobs. Cole’s case was a direct test of that protection. Foxmar violated it.

When courts allow employers to suppress attorney fee awards for VOSHA retaliation claims, they remove the financial incentive for lawyers to take those cases. Workers who cannot find lawyers to represent them do not report safety violations. Safety violations that go unreported do not get corrected. The public health consequence is not abstract: it is the next worker who gets hurt in a workplace where the prior victim was too afraid to file a complaint, or too defeated after watching what happened to the person who tried. The source documents do not record what specific safety concern Cole raised — but the legal system’s willingness to punish him for raising it at all is documented in full.

The Cost of a Life Metric

What Now?

The People Still Pulling the Strings

The source documents identify the following parties whose conduct and positions in this case warrant ongoing public scrutiny:

• Foxmar, Inc. (d/b/a Education and Training Resources) — The Vermont-based company found by two separate juries to have violated VOSHA and VESTA through unlawful retaliation against a worker. Their legal strategy attempted to gut fee-shifting protections for all Vermont workers.
• Bond, Schoeneck & King, PLLC — The corporate law firm representing Foxmar, whose attorneys argued for the proportionality rule the appeals court ruled was illegal under Vermont law.
• Vermont Department of Labor — The state agency responsible for enforcing VOSHA and VESTA. Workers experiencing retaliation for exercising sick leave or reporting safety violations can file complaints here.
• Vermont Attorney General’s Office — Has authority to investigate systemic patterns of employer retaliation and unfair labor practices statewide.
• U.S. Department of Labor / OSHA — Federal oversight body for occupational safety. VOSHA operates as Vermont’s state OSHA plan; federal OSHA retains jurisdiction when state enforcement fails.
• Vermont Legislature — The body that passed VOSHA and VESTA with explicit fee-shifting provisions. Constituents should demand those provisions be codified with additional clarity to prevent future courts from misapplying them the way this one did.

What You Can Actually Do Right Now

If you are a Vermont worker and your employer has punished you for using sick time, reporting a safety hazard, or exercising any workplace right, the law is on your side — and this ruling just confirmed that the law means what it says. Contact Vermont Legal Aid, the Vermont Workers’ Center, or a local employment attorney who handles VOSHA and VESTA claims. Fee-shifting means the employer pays your lawyer if you win. That protection is now more secure because of Cole’s seven-year fight. Document everything. Report safety violations in writing. Know that the courts — when pushed — will enforce the rules.

Beyond individual action: support the Vermont Workers’ Center and mutual aid networks in your county that provide emergency support to workers in the middle of legal battles, when income disappears and cases drag on for years. The legal system eventually ruled correctly in this case. It took seven years. People need support while they wait. Build that support in your community before the next Thomas Cole needs it.