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...
WASHINGTON, July 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- This release is issued by King & Spalding: The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that New York Packaging II LLC, doing business as Redi-Bag USA,...