Hungry Like A Wolf: this restaurant illegally fired workers for unionizing.

You Went on Strike. You Got Fired. Congratulations, It Was Illegal. Now What?

In July 2022, Niroj Hiransomboon and his wife purchased Hungry Like the Wolf, a karaoke restaurant in Houston, Texas, through their company Hiran Management. The restaurant employed roughly twenty workers. Eight of them worked the front of house: hosts, bartenders, servers, and bussers.

Hiran hired a manager named Paul Peters to run the front of house staff. Almost immediately, the workers started running into problems. Peters assigned them extra duties without additional pay: checking inventory, collecting money from the safe, opening and closing the restaurant. Peters promised several of them extra money for acting as “shift supervisors.” He did not consistently deliver on that promise.

Peters scheduled a staff meeting for September 18, 2022, to address the complaints. Seven front of house workers attended. The meeting collapsed. After a heated exchange, the workers walked out. That same evening, they got together, decided to go on strike, and wrote up a list of demands.

They Struck. He Fired. The NLRB Came Knocking.

On September 20, 2022, most of the eight workers did not return to work. One worker, Knowshaidymar Cuevas, showed up, worked for about an hour, and then joined the strike. The company’s lawyer invited the striking workers to a meeting on September 29 to discuss their demands. The meeting produced nothing. One week later, on October 6, 2022, the lawyer notified the striking workers that they were no longer employees of Hiran Management.

The eight fired workers were: Jordan Logan, Dara Kiel, Knowshaidymar Cuevas, Ashton Cano, Melaina Alexander, Sarah Havemann, Natalie Reul, and Kenneth Thornton. The NLRB filed an administrative complaint against Hiran, alleging the company violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits employers from interfering with workers’ rights to engage in collective action. The case went to trial in November 2023.

An administrative law judge ruled in favor of the workers. Hiran appealed. The Board upheld the ruling with minor adjustments and ordered Hiran to stop its illegal practices, reinstate the workers, and make them whole for lost wages, lost benefits, and all other “direct or foreseeable pecuniary harms” caused by the illegal firings.

The Real Bill: What Getting Illegally Fired Actually Costs a Person

A court ruling that calls something “illegal” but refuses to make the victims whole is a statement about whose lives the law values. Hiran Management fired eight workers knowing full well those workers had done something the law explicitly protects. The company sat on that decision for sixteen days between the failed September 29 meeting and the October 6 termination notice, letting the workers hang. That is not a snap judgment. That is a calculated choice to destroy people’s economic stability.

The NLRB’s Thryv decision, issued in 2022, tried to reckon honestly with what illegal firings actually do to working people. The Board listed the real-world consequences: credit card debt, late fees on credit cards, early withdrawal penalties from retirement accounts, missed loan and mortgage payments, transportation costs, childcare costs the worker had to cover out of pocket when they lost their employer-connected income, utility disconnection or reconnection fees, relocation or moving costs when the rent could not be paid, legal representation costs in eviction proceedings, and even costs related to changes in immigration status. The NLRB’s General Counsel later added unreimbursed tuition payments, job search costs, day care costs, and specialty tool costs to the list.

Read that list again. Every single item on it is something that happens to real people when the paycheck disappears without warning. These are not hypothetical harms. Childcare does not pause because your employer broke the law. Your landlord does not accept “my employer violated the NLRA” as a rent payment. The utility company does not wait for a court order before disconnecting your power. The clock on all of it starts the second you get that termination notice.

The Fifth Circuit’s October 31, 2025 ruling stripped every one of those categories away. The court held that the NLRB lacks the legal authority to order compensation for “all direct or foreseeable pecuniary harms.” In practice, what the court left the workers with is backpay: essentially a refund of the wages they would have earned. The court’s logic is that compensating workers for the full cascading financial damage of an illegal firing crosses from “equitable” territory into “legal damages” territory, and the NLRA only authorizes equitable remedies. The legal distinction is real. The effect on a single parent who fell behind on rent, racked up credit card debt covering groceries, and paid an attorney to fight an eviction is that none of that counts. The employer caused it. The employer pays nothing for it.

What the ruling also does, quietly, is confirm that the cost of illegal union-busting at a small business is essentially just back wages, capped by whatever the workers would have earned during the gap. For a twenty-person karaoke restaurant, that is a manageable accounting problem. The workers absorb the rest. They absorb the panic of not knowing how rent gets paid. They absorb the shame of asking family for money, the stress of watching a credit score crater, the fear of an eviction notice, the impossible math of covering childcare on zero income. The law looks at all of that and says: not our department.

The workers’ names deserve to be spoken plainly: Jordan Logan, Dara Kiel, Knowshaidymar Cuevas, Ashton Cano, Melaina Alexander, Sarah Havemann, Natalie Reul, and Kenneth Thornton. They organized because their manager made promises about additional pay for additional duties and then broke those promises. They struck because the only language that carries weight in that situation is collective economic pressure. They paid for that with their jobs, their income, and the domino of consequences that follows. The company admitted in court that what it did was illegal. The court agreed. And still, the law found a way to protect the company’s wallet over these eight people’s lives.

Straight From the Documents: The Quotes That Tell the Whole Story

“Hiran does not dispute that it unlawfully discharged the Employees based on their ‘concerted activities for . . . mutual aid or protection.'” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, October 31, 2025. The company’s own legal position confirmed the firings were illegal. Everything after this is about how much — or how little — the workers get compensated for that admitted wrongdoing.

“For the first ninety years of the NLRB’s existence, it did not claim the power to order damages for all foreseeable harms resulting from an unfair labor practice.” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, October 31, 2025. The court used this 90-year gap to argue the NLRB was overreaching. Critics would note the 90-year gap also means workers have been under-compensated for illegal retaliation for nine decades.

“The Board’s order mandated that Hiran cease and desist from its unfair labor practices, reinstate the discharged Employees, and make the Employees whole ‘for any loss of earnings and other benefits, and for any other direct or foreseeable pecuniary harms suffered as a result’ of the unfair labor practices.” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, describing the NLRB’s original order — the order the court then partially dismantled.

“‘Foreseeable pecuniary harms’ could include ‘interest and late fees on credit cards,’ penalties for ‘early withdrawals’ from retirement accounts, ‘loan or mortgage payments,’ ‘transportation or childcare costs,’ ‘credit card debt,’ and ‘other costs simply to make ends meet.'” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, quoting the NLRB’s Thryv decision (2022). The court listed these categories in order to classify them as legal damages, and then ruled the NLRB cannot order them.

“The Supreme Court has explained that the NLRB’s ‘power to order affirmative relief’ does not include a ‘general scheme authorizing the Board to award full compensatory damages for injuries caused by wrongful conduct.'” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, citing UAW-CIO v. Russell, 356 U.S. 634 (1958). The court used a 1958 Supreme Court precedent to block 2022-era worker protections.

“In contrast to its expansion of section 706(g), Congress has not seen fit to expand the remedies available under section 10(c) of the NLRA. If compensatory damages were possible under section 706(g) only with an amendment, they must remain unavailable under section 10(c) until Congress amends the NLRA.” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, October 31, 2025. The court’s conclusion: Congress has to fix this. Until Congress acts, illegally fired workers cannot be made fully whole for the damage employers caused them.

The Cost the Court Decided Didn’t Count

This Is Bigger Than Eight People at a Karaoke Bar

Economic Inequality: A Legal Framework That Protects the Payroll, Not the Person

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling does not exist in a vacuum. A circuit split is already in play: the Third Circuit sided with this ruling; the Ninth Circuit went the other way and upheld the NLRB’s broader damages framework. That split means what you can recover after your employer illegally fires you for organizing now depends substantially on which state you live in.

The Thryv framework, which the Fifth Circuit dismantled for workers in its jurisdiction, was built on a simple recognition: when a worker loses their job due to illegal retaliation, the damage extends far beyond the missing paycheck. It ripples through every financial commitment that paycheck was supporting. The categories the NLRB named — childcare, transportation, utilities, credit card debt, mortgage payments, eviction legal fees — are not fringe situations. They are the standard financial reality for hourly and service-industry workers living paycheck to paycheck.

By capping recovery at equitable backpay, the ruling effectively subsidizes union-busting for small business owners. The calculus becomes simple: fire the organizers, pay back their wages if you lose the case, and accept zero liability for the full financial collapse those workers experienced in the interim. That is a business decision, not a moral one, and the law just made it easier to make.

The ruling also exposes a structural gap in Congressional action. The court explicitly stated that the NLRB cannot award compensatory damages until Congress amends the NLRA to authorize them, just as Congress amended Title VII in 1991 to allow compensatory and punitive damages in employment discrimination cases. That amendment took decades of advocacy and political will. The workers fired from Hungry Like the Wolf in October 2022 do not have decades. They had rent due in November.

Public Health: The Hidden Cost of Sudden Job Loss

The NLRB’s Thryv framework explicitly listed the categories of harm it was trying to address: childcare coverage gaps, transportation loss, utility disconnections, and costs from immigration status changes. These are public health issues in addition to financial ones. Childcare disruption affects child development. Utility disconnection in Texas, where summer heat is lethal, is a genuine safety risk. Loss of employer-adjacent health coverage, which the court’s prior cases confirm can be included in backpay awards as a matter of contract, is now the limit of what the law demands an employer restore.

Service industry workers like those at Hungry Like the Wolf rarely have robust savings buffers. Research consistently shows that sudden income loss in low-wage work correlates with increased food insecurity, housing instability, and mental health deterioration. The law’s refusal to account for these downstream harms does not make them disappear. It simply transfers the cost from the employer who caused them to the worker who experienced them, and to the public systems — food banks, emergency housing programs, community health clinics — that absorb the overflow.

Who Is Watching and What You Can Actually Do

Corporate Roles at Hiran Management

The source document identifies the following individuals connected to the ownership and legal operation of Hiran Management, Incorporated, doing business as Hungry Like the Wolf:

• ▸ Niroj Hiransomboon — Owner/Operator of Hiran Management, Inc.
• ▸ Paul Peters — Manager, front of house operations; broke pay promises to workers
• ▸ Bruce Hiransomboon — Company lawyer who delivered the October 6 termination notice to striking workers

Regulatory Watchlist

What You Can Do Right Now

Contact your Congressional representatives and demand they introduce or co-sponsor legislation amending Section 10(c) of the NLRA to explicitly authorize compensatory damages for workers harmed by illegal retaliation. The court told you the door that needs opening. Push on it.

Support local labor organizing funds and mutual aid networks in your city. The gap between what the law compensates and what illegally fired workers actually lose is filled by community, not courts. Houston-area worker centers and national organizations like the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) work directly with service-industry workers facing exactly this kind of retaliation.

If you work in a small business and face retaliation for organizing, file a charge with the NLRB immediately regardless of this ruling. Reinstatement and backpay remain available remedies. Document everything. The legal landscape is shifting, and the workers who file charges shape what future courts and legislators see.