Appeals court keeps one firing, sends three back - and flags how the NLRB overreached
A federal appeals court has handed a software company a partial win after the NLRB ruled it illegally fired four engineers over a salary spreadsheet.
The D.C. Circuit on May 26, 2026 upheld the National Labor Relations Board's finding that Vermont Information Processing illegally fired Christopher Bendel, the engineer who created the spreadsheet. But it vacated the Board's findings as to three of his coworkers and sent those cases back for further proceedings.
The dispute started in February 2022. According to the opinion, Bendel met with his supervisor, Sam Graefe, to talk through how a company restructuring would affect his role. The meeting did not go well. Later that day, Bendel messaged a coworker, software engineer Kaleb Noble, called the meeting a "shitshow," and asked, "[W]anna start a [salary] spreadsheet?" Noble agreed. The spreadsheet was then shared with two more engineers, Gordon Dragoon and Kestrel Swift.
The next morning, during and after a virtual all-hands meeting to launch the restructuring, the four began sharing the link with the rest of the company. About 25 coworkers added their information. The file noted that "100 [percent]" of VIP's software developers were "underpaid."
Within roughly 90 minutes of management finding the spreadsheet, VIP disabled Bendel's accounts and fired him. The next day, after the IT director surfaced the group's internal messages, VIP fired Dragoon, Noble, and Swift too.
The Board found all four firings illegal. It ordered reinstatement and a make-whole financial remedy that included "reasonable search-for-work and interim employment expenses, if any, regardless of whether these expenses exceed interim earnings," citing its 2022 decision in Thryv.
The D.C. Circuit agreed as to Bendel. Substantial evidence, the court said, supported the Board's finding that VIP's "shifting explanations" for his firing pointed to animus toward protected concerted activity. Salary-sharing among employees is protected under the National Labor Relations Act - the federal law covering union and collective workplace activity. The court rejected VIP's arguments that it fired Bendel for disrupting the restructuring, misusing company IT resources, or being disloyal, calling them pretextual.
The result was different for the other three. The court found the Board had stretched the case too far by treating the employees' online chats about "workplace conditions" as protected conduct, even though the General Counsel's complaint had charged only the creation and sharing of the spreadsheet. That, the court said, violated VIP's due-process rights. "Workplace conditions," in the court's words, is "a far-reaching category that can encompass anything from salaries to cafeteria options to interpersonal office dynamics."
VIP also tried to challenge the Board's broader Thryv remedy on appeal, arguing it amounts to unauthorized compensatory damages. The court declined to take that up, ruling VIP had not preserved the argument before the Board. Judge Walker dissented in part on that point, writing that the NLRA authorizes only equitable relief and that Thryv "crosses the boundary that Congress drew."
For HR, the case lands as a clean reminder. Salary-sharing is protected activity. Firing employees quickly after finding out about it is an easy way to draw an animus finding. And pretextual reasons - the "we fired him for X, not the spreadsheet" defense - rarely hold up when the timing tells a different story.
There is also a procedural lesson for the agency side. The General Counsel's complaint sets the outer edge of what the Board can rely on. Broadening the theory of liability after the hearing - here, by reaching into chats about "workplace conditions" that were not charged - can be enough to sink an otherwise solid case.
