Salary Spreadsheets Are Protected by NLRA. Firing Fast Sometimes Isn’t

On May 26, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Board’s finding that Vermont Information Processing (VIP) illegally fired the engineer who started a company-wide salary spreadsheet. But it vacated the findings as to three coworkers and sent those cases back.

Here’s what happened. In February 2022, engineer Christopher Bendel left a bad meeting about a restructuring, messaged a coworker calling it a “shitshow,” and asked, “wanna start a salary spreadsheet?” They did. Roughly 25 employees added their pay. The file concluded “100%” of VIP’s developers were underpaid.

Within about 90 minutes of finding it, VIP disabled Bendel’s accounts and fired him. The next day, three more.

The court agreed Bendel’s firing was unlawful. VIP’s “shifting explanations” — disruption, IT misuse, disloyalty — read as pretext. Salary-sharing is protected concerted activity under the NLRA, full stop.

But the Board overreached on the other three. It leaned on their chats about “workplace conditions” — a phrase the court called broad enough to cover “anything from salaries to cafeteria options” — when the complaint only charged the spreadsheet. That violated VIP’s due-process rights.

Two takeaways. For employers: firing fast after discovering protected activity is how you hand the Board an animus finding. Pretext rarely survives the timeline.