Labor Rights / Corporate Misconduct

You Made a Spreadsheet.
They Made You an Example.

Vermont Information Processing, Inc. fired four software engineers for comparing their salaries. A federal court just ruled that was illegal. Here is exactly what happened, why it was allowed to drag on for years, and what it tells you about who the system is really built for.

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals • Case No. 24-1360 • Decided May 26, 2026

The Non-Financial Ledger

Four people went to work on a Tuesday morning in February 2022. They were good at their jobs. They were not organizing a union. They were not planning a strike. They were doing something far simpler and far more human: they were asking each other if they were being paid fairly.

Kaleb Noble put the stakes plainly when he explained the spreadsheet’s purpose: if you want to ask for a raise, you need a reference point to know whether you are being underpaid. That is not radicalism. That is basic self-preservation in a labor market where your employer knows exactly what every comparable employee earns and you are expected to negotiate blind.

Christopher Bendel created the spreadsheet. He shared his salary. Noble shared his. Within hours, around twenty-five colleagues had added their own information. This is what solidarity looks like when it is not yet organized. It is just people, quietly trying to figure out if the deal they signed is as fair as they were told it was.

By noon that same day, Bendel’s work accounts were disabled. His computer was locked remotely. He was fired over a call. The reason given by his manager was Bendel’s “attitude” toward the company restructuring. The spreadsheet was not mentioned out loud to him. It did not need to be. Management had convened an emergency meeting over it two hours earlier. The CFO had called it “not appropriate,” “not accurate,” and something that “serve[d] no purpose.” A decision was made in a closed room. Then Bendel’s access to his own work was cut off.

The following day, three more people lost their jobs. Gordon Dragoon, Kaleb Noble, and Kestrel Swift had spent the previous afternoon venting to each other in private messages about what had just happened to their coworker. They were frustrated. They were scared. They said things that reflected the anger of people watching a colleague get punished for something they did together. That same day, a manager held a company-wide meeting and announced that employees were “still free” to share salary information. The four people who had just been fired for doing exactly that were no longer in the audience.

The financial remedies ordered by the court cannot account for the months of uncertainty, the cost of searching for new work, the specific texture of being told your job has been taken from you by a remote lockout before you even get the phone call. The law has a word for what VIP did: illegal. But what the four workers experienced has no line item in a damages calculation.

Legal Receipts

The court record contains direct quotes from internal communications, management testimony, and judicial findings. These are the words that proved the case.

“The idea in my mind is so if you wanna ask for a raise you got some reference to see if you’re getting fisted lol.”

Kaleb Noble, explaining the spreadsheet’s purpose in an internal chat message. Court record, J.A. 1145.

• This message establishes the spreadsheet’s purpose as salary comparison for collective bargaining power, the definition of protected concerted activity under the NLRA. There is nothing covert, retaliatory, or malicious in this statement. It is a worker trying to level an information asymmetry that exists entirely in the employer’s favor.
• The court used this and similar messages to confirm the workers were engaged in protected mutual aid. VIP’s argument that the spreadsheet was a tool of disruption rather than collective benefit was rejected partly because this evidence showed the workers’ actual intent.

“[The spreadsheet] was ‘not appropriate,’ ‘not accurate,’ and ‘serve[d] no purpose.'”

CFO John Simard, regarding the salary spreadsheet. Court record, J.A. 1028.

• Simard drove the decision to fire Bendel. The court record states management decided to terminate Bendel “based largely on Simard’s arguments.” Simard’s characterization of a salary transparency tool as serving “no purpose” is the documented corporate motive, not a side comment.
• The court found VIP offered no evidence that the spreadsheet was materially inaccurate. The “100% underpaid” notation was ruled a protected statement of opinion. Simard’s claim that it was “not accurate” was therefore a basis for termination that the legal record does not support.

“The timing of the terminations and the lack of any credible evidence that [VIP] planned to discharge [Bendel] prior to [the day that management learned of the spreadsheet] supports the inference of discriminatory discharge.”

NLRB Board, adopted by the D.C. Circuit. Court record, J.A. 1739.

• This is the finding that sealed VIP’s liability on Bendel. The Board and the court both concluded that before management saw the spreadsheet, there was no plan to fire Bendel. After they saw it, he was fired in 90 minutes.
• Prior to that day, management had planned to give Bendel a specific role in the restructured company. Director McGinty had even expressed hope that Bendel “could play a role in planning” the restructuring despite their tense conversation.

“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, in a two-year-old performance review that management surfaced after the firings. Court record, J.A. 1366.

• Management used this quote from a performance review written two years before the firing as justification for terminating Swift. CFO Simard was “concerned” by the statement and “successfully advocated” for firing the remaining three workers.
• The appeals court vacated the NLRB’s findings on Swift, Dragoon, and Noble on procedural grounds, meaning whether using a two-year-old performance review entry as termination justification was itself unlawful has not yet been fully adjudicated.
• Swift’s statement is also a precise and accurate description of an at-will employment relationship. The fact that management treated an employee’s honest self-assessment of their own labor conditions as a fireable offense illustrates the core dynamic this case exposes.

Public Deception

VIP gave multiple documented public explanations for the firings, each of which the court found the evidence did not support.

• VIP claimed it fired Bendel for using the company’s IT resources for “non-business purposes.” The court found the executives who made the termination decision did not cite resource use as a factor. One Operations Director “kind of chuckled” at other developers editing the spreadsheet. The CFO said of those other employees’ entries: “We didn’t care. It [didn’t] matter.” VIP also provided no evidence it had ever disciplined any other employee for comparable resource use.
• VIP claimed the spreadsheet was “misleading and confusing.” The NLRB administrative law judge found the spreadsheet was not “materially inaccurate” and that the “100% underpaid” notation was “a statement of opinion, not an inaccurate statement of fact.” VIP offered no basis for the appellate court to overturn that factual finding.
• VIP claimed it fired Bendel for his “hostility toward the company,” citing his poor meetings with managers about the restructuring. The court found that neither of Bendel’s supervisors indicated after those meetings that he might be fired. One supervisor accepted “some of the blame” for the tense conversation. VIP had already planned to give Bendel a new role in the restructured company.
• VIP claimed it fired Bendel because he “used the spreadsheet to disrupt the roll-out of the restructuring plan and to immunize himself against possible termination.” The court found this was “just another way of indicating that Bendel was terminated because he engaged in protected concerted activity.” The court specifically noted that no authority permits an employer to fire an employee for protected conduct simply because the employer objects to the manner, timing, or motive behind it.

How Capitalism Exploits Delay: Time as a Corporate Weapon

The workers were fired in February 2022. The D.C. Circuit issued its ruling on May 26, 2026. That is over four years between the illegal act and the final appellate ruling, and the case is still not fully resolved for three of the four workers.

• The case traveled through the NLRB charge process, a full administrative law judge hearing with live witness testimony, NLRB Board review, and a federal appellate court proceeding argued October 15, 2025 and decided May 26, 2026. Each stage added months. The workers moved on to other jobs. The legal fight continued without them in any practical sense.
• Three of the four workers, Dragoon, Noble, and Swift, had their cases vacated and remanded. They now face additional proceedings at the NLRB to determine whether their firings were unlawful under a properly scoped theory. Four years in, they still do not have a final ruling.
• VIP’s legal strategy at the appellate level included switching arguments entirely. The company abandoned its “windfall” remedy argument from the NLRB proceedings and launched a broad attack on the NLRB’s Thryv remedy framework. The court held it lacked jurisdiction to hear that argument because VIP had not raised it before the Board. This gambit cost time and resources and nearly succeeded in insulating the company from a financial remedy it had never properly challenged on the merits.
• VIP also attempted a Seventh Amendment constitutional challenge to the make-whole remedy at the appellate level, a theory it conceded it had not raised before the Board. The Supreme Court’s ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy, issued in June 2024, had given VIP an opening, but VIP failed to bring it to the Board’s attention while the case was still pending there. The court declined jurisdiction on this argument as well.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health of the Workplace

The documented conduct here represents a direct attack on the psychological and economic safety of workers in the technology sector, a sector that disproportionately relies on individual negotiation rather than collective contracts to set pay.

• Four workers lost their jobs for a single collaborative act: comparing salaries to understand whether they were being paid fairly. The chilling effect on their approximately twenty-five coworkers who also entered data into the spreadsheet, and who witnessed the firings, is documented but uncompensated. Those workers now understand what sharing pay information costs.
• The firings happened the same morning as VIP’s all-hands restructuring announcement. Workers who might otherwise have used the salary data to negotiate terms during a reorganization lost that information and those four colleagues simultaneously. The restructuring proceeded without opposition.
• Two years after the firings, VIP had still not completed legal accountability for three of the four workers. Workers at other companies watching this case had no final ruling to point to for four years and counting.

Economic Inequality

The salary-sharing spreadsheet was a direct economic intervention: workers pooling information to counterbalance an employer’s structural information advantage in wage-setting. VIP eliminated it before it could be used.

• The spreadsheet reached approximately twenty-five coworkers before management disabled it. Any of those workers who had planned to use the data for raise negotiations lost their reference point the same day they gained it. The court record does not document what happened to those workers’ wages, because no one filed a charge on their behalf.
• The NLRB’s Thryv make-whole remedy, upheld for Bendel, requires VIP to cover all direct and foreseeable financial harms he suffered, not just back pay. This is significant: it includes expenses like job search costs, any credit obligations affected by the income gap, and comparable out-of-pocket costs. This is the closest the legal system has come to actually accounting for the full economic damage of an illegal firing. The fact that it is now being contested across five federal circuits suggests corporate interests understand exactly what is at stake.
• Three workers, Dragoon, Noble, and Swift, face further proceedings with no guarantee of a make-whole outcome, despite having been fired the day after Bendel under circumstances the ALJ found were “inextricably linked” to the same protected activity. The procedural technicality that sent their cases back does not change the documented facts of what happened to them.

The Remedy Is Not Justice

The court affirmed the NLRB’s order against VIP for Bendel’s unlawful termination, but the structural reality of what accountability looks like in this case reveals how far the remedy falls short.

• VIP was ordered to offer Bendel reinstatement. Bendel has already found other employment and has expressed no desire to return to VIP. The reinstatement order is legally meaningful as a remedy, but practically, the court acknowledged it may result in nothing more than a formal offer that is declined. The illegal firing already happened. The offer cannot undo it.
• Three of the four workers have no final remedy as of the May 2026 ruling. Their cases were remanded. They have been waiting over four years. Whatever financial harm they suffered in the months after their terminations has already been absorbed by them personally, whether or not the NLRB eventually orders compensation.
• The court did not address VIP’s broad challenge to the Thryv make-whole remedy, holding that VIP failed to preserve those arguments before the Board. This means the question of whether the NLRB can require compensation for “all direct or foreseeable pecuniary harms” beyond backpay remains unresolved in this case, even though it is the most significant aspect of the remedy for workers going forward.
• A dissenting judge on the appellate panel argued the Thryv framework itself exceeds the NLRB’s statutory authority under Section 10(c) of the NLRA, citing the Third Circuit, Fifth Circuit, and individual circuit judges across multiple cases reaching the same conclusion. If this view prevails in a future case or at the Supreme Court, workers illegally fired will be limited to back pay and reinstatement, with no compensation for late fees, lost housing payments, increased childcare costs, or any other real financial damage caused by the illegal termination.

This Is the System Working as Intended

The outcome in this case is not a malfunction. The documented facts show a system operating exactly as the balance of power in American labor law was designed to allow.

• VIP fired workers for a federally protected activity and offered four different post-hoc justifications in legal proceedings, each one rejected by the courts as pretextual. The company faced no criminal sanction, no punitive fine, and no consequence for what the court characterized as “shifting explanations” that amounted to evidence of anti-union animus. The remedy is backpay and a reinstatement offer the worker does not want.
• The NLRA protects salary sharing. VIP knew this. McGinty announced at a company-wide meeting immediately after the firings that employees were “still free” to share salary information. VIP communicated its awareness of the law while having just violated it. The announcement functioned simultaneously as a legal shield and a warning.
• The multi-year timeline from illegal act to partial legal remedy is not an anomaly. It is the standard experience of NLRA enforcement for individual workers without union representation and without the resources to independently prosecute their cases. The NLRB carries these cases forward, but the agency’s capacity and political environment determine whether enforcement happens at all.
• The most consequential legal battle in this case is not about these four workers. It is about whether the Thryv make-whole remedy, which would require companies to actually compensate workers for the full cost of illegal firings, survives circuit court scrutiny. Three circuits have already moved against it. A corporate incentive to challenge the Thryv framework exists: if companies can limit damages to back pay, the math of illegal firing shifts further in their favor.
• The three workers whose cases were remanded were fired the day after Bendel, after management reviewed their private messages. Those messages included expressions of frustration, profane complaints about management, discussions of leaving the company, and a two-year-old performance review entry stating a workers’ honest assessment of the employment relationship. Management used these messages as the firing justification. The court found the Board had overreached procedurally, but did not rule those firings lawful. The workers wait.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

Editorial analysis. The following recommendations are grounded in the specific failure modes documented in this case and are clearly identified as the authors’ conclusions, not findings of the source document.

The core structural failure this case exposes: the legal remedy for illegal retaliation against federally protected labor activity takes longer to obtain than the financial damage takes to land, costs the worker nothing but years of uncertainty, and currently faces active legal attack in multiple federal circuits that would reduce it further.

Regulatory Track

• The NLRB should develop a fast-track enforcement process for retaliation cases where the timeline between protected activity and termination is documented as a matter of weeks or days. A 90-minute termination timeline following the discovery of a salary spreadsheet should not take four years to litigate to a partial resolution.
• The NLRB should issue clear, plain-language guidance to workers in non-union workplaces specifically about salary sharing rights. McGinty’s post-firing announcement that workers were “still free” to share salaries underscores that VIP knew the law. Workers at other companies may not.
• Interim relief mechanisms that provide financial support to workers during the multi-year adjudication period should be prioritized. Workers who are illegally fired cannot wait years for backpay while their financial obligations continue in real time.

Legislative Track

• Congress should amend Section 10(c) of the NLRA to expressly authorize compensatory and consequential damages for workers harmed by unfair labor practices, resolving the circuit split over the Thryv framework by statute rather than leaving it to courts to find authorization that may not exist in the current statutory text.
• Legislation should establish minimum civil penalties per unlawful termination, independent of backpay calculations, to create a genuine deterrent for employers who currently face no financial consequence beyond restoration of the harm they caused. A company that illegally fires a worker and faces only backpay has made a financially rational decision if it delays adjudication long enough.
• The shifting-explanation pattern documented in this case, four separate post-hoc justifications all rejected as pretextual, should be addressed through legislation creating a rebuttable presumption of unlawful motive when an employer cannot provide contemporaneous documentation of a termination rationale and the firing closely follows protected activity.

Corporate Governance Track

• VIP’s board and executive team made a termination decision in under two hours, based primarily on one executive’s characterization of a salary transparency tool as “not appropriate” and “serving no purpose.” Governance structures at companies of this size should require documented HR review and legal counsel sign-off before terminations connected to protected activity.
• Companies should be required to maintain contemporaneous documentation of all termination rationales at the time of the decision, not reconstructed during litigation. The court’s finding that VIP offered “shifting explanations” is a direct product of the absence of contemporaneous records.

What Now?

VIP’s CFO John Simard drove the decision to fire Bendel and the three remaining workers. The Director of Development Christopher McGinty and Operations Director Louise Morgan were the first to review the spreadsheet and escalate. These are the documented decision-makers named in the court record.

Regulatory Watchlist

• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): The primary enforcement body here. The NLRB will now handle the remanded proceedings for Dragoon, Noble, and Swift. Watch for whether the NLRB re-opens their cases under a properly scoped theory and whether the current Board composition affects enforcement posture.
• D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals: The court that issued this ruling. Future Thryv-related cases will continue to shape whether the make-whole remedy survives. This circuit’s position matters for all NLRB enforcement in the D.C. region.
• Third Circuit, Fifth Circuit: Both have already ruled against the Thryv framework. A Supreme Court case on the scope of NLRB remedial authority is a realistic near-term possibility.
• U.S. Supreme Court: SEC v. Jarkesy opened a constitutional door that VIP attempted to walk through in this case but failed to preserve. A future case with a properly preserved Seventh Amendment challenge to Thryv could reach the Supreme Court and determine whether workers can recover anything beyond back pay from companies that illegally fire them.

What You Can Do

• Know your rights now, not later: In the United States, you have the federally protected right to discuss your salary with coworkers. You cannot legally be fired for it. Share this with people you work with before a crisis, not after one.
• Document contemporaneously: If you engage in salary sharing, union organizing, or any other protected activity and face any form of retaliation (schedule changes, negative reviews, role alterations, termination), document dates, times, and who said what in writing immediately. The timeline between protected activity and employer action is central to every NLRB case.
• File a charge: NLRB charges can be filed directly at nlrb.gov. The process is free. The statute of limitations for filing an unfair labor practice charge is six months from the date of the alleged violation. Do not wait.
• Find your local workers’ center: Non-union workers in industries without strong collective representation can access legal support, know-your-rights training, and community organizing through local workers’ centers. Search for your region’s affiliate through the National Day Laborer Organizing Network or the National Employment Law Project.
• Support the Thryv framework: The fight over whether illegally fired workers can recover more than back pay is happening in federal courts right now. Organizations like the Economic Policy Institute and labor law clinics at law schools track these cases. Follow them. The outcome affects every worker in a non-union workplace.