Four engineers fired by their employer, Vermont Information Processing, after sharing salary information are entitled to get their jobs back, an administrative law judge at the National Labor Relations Board found on Monday.
The employees of the Colchester software company were fired last year after creating a spreadsheet for employees to share their salary information.
Administrative Law Judge Arthur Amchan found that such sharing of information is legally protected activity, and VIP broke the law when it fired the four men. He has ordered the company to make them whole for any loss of earnings and benefits.
Three of the former employees — Christopher Bendel, Gordon Dragoon and Kestrel Swift — praised the decision in a group interview Tuesday. The fourth employee, Kaleb Noble, was not available.
“Justice was served,” Bendel said.
Stephen Ellis, an attorney for VIP, said the company is appealing. “VIP has never prohibited employees from discussing salaries and never will,” Ellis wrote in a statement emailed to VTDigger. He called the decision “legally mistaken” and said it “does not fairly reflect the evidence or the practical realities of VIP’s business.”
In February 2022, Noble was about to be promoted to a position similar to Bendel’s and asked Bendel how much he made. Bendel told Noble he was making $95,000 a year. Noble was making $86,000 at the time.
“I told him why don’t we put this in a spreadsheet so that other people don’t have to go around asking what people make,” Bendel said.
Bendel and Noble made a spreadsheet in which employees could enter their names if they wanted, their department, their position and their salary. They sent it to Swift and Dragoon, who shared it with other employees.
The next morning, the four employees were discussing the spreadsheet in a group chat on their company’s computers. The company’s director of operations gained access to the spreadsheet, according to the decision by Arthur Amchan, the administrative law judge, and the company disabled Bendel’s work account and took down the spreadsheet.
By noon, the decision notes, the company had fired Bendel.
“Within an hour, I got a call being notified that I was fired,” Bendel said. “They said I had a poor attitude in the past and I asked context for that, and they just repeated the line.”
After that, Noble invited Bendel into a conversation on Slack, an application used for communication in the workplace, along with Swift and Dragoon. In that conversation, Swift, Dragoon and Noble talked about leaving the company, but also about unionizing.
Swift, Noble and Dragoon protested the firing of Bendel with management. VIP, in its brief, said the three engineers’ “displeasure” with Bendel’s termination was a factor that the company considered in terminating them. Amchan found that their protests with management were, like the spreadsheet, protected activity.
A few days later, Swift, Dragoon and Noble were fired. They said they were told it was because they were unhappy at the company.
“I was called by the (chief financial officer) and he just said that I was unhappy at the company,” Swift said. “I disagreed and said that I didn’t agree with some of the decisions, but I wanted to keep working there and make things better. And he just said that my written word contradicted that.”
VIP Chief Financial Officer John Simard did not return a voicemail asking for an interview.
The men filed a complaint in August of last year with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging violations of the National Labor Relations Act. The board investigated the charges and its general counsel decided to prosecute.
In his decision, Amchan wrote that the company must also notify all employees that it violated federal law and that it guarantees employees the right to act together for their mutual benefit and protection and to form, join or assist a union.
Ellis told VTDigger that VIP must be able to trust its engineers with access to valuable and confidential data and information technology.
“These four engineers violated that trust and lost VIP’s confidence for reasons other than legally protected salary discussions,” Ellis said.
Swift, Dragoon and Noble were fired after VIP discovered that they were hostile to the proposed restructuring, discussed looking for jobs elsewhere, and talked about “purging” their VIP computers, according to Ellis.
In a chat after Bendel was fired, Noble had written, “Purge your computers, boys,” but Judge Amchan found that none of the four engineers purged or deleted any material from their computers and that VIP never investigated whether they did or not.
“More importantly, Noble’s comment is open to many interpretations, the most logical is that he was afraid of management seeing the 3 programmers’ comments disparaging VIP and its management,” Amchan wrote in his decision. “VIP made no effort to ask Noble what he meant.”
Amchan also found that Simard did not tell Swift, Dragoon or Noble that he was concerned about the security of VIP’s data or systems when he fired them. The judge found a lack of any credible evidence that VIP planned to discharge any of the four engineers prior to when they discussed the spreadsheet.
The former employees said they hope the decision will lead to changes at the Colchester company.
“I felt a lot of relief,” Swift said of hearing the decision. “It’s been a very stressful year of change and there is a sense of vindication, validation, to know that the federal government agrees with our points, and to not have it be able to be swept under the rug was very validating.”
Swift has moved to California, where he has a new job. The other men have also found other jobs, all in Vermont.
While the labor board says all four men are entitled to get their VIP jobs back, their plans remain up in the air, since VIP is appealing the decision.
“I just really hope that positive changes are able to happen at VIP because of this and, by extension, elsewhere,” said Dragoon.
“I hope this sends a message that you should respect your employees and let them exercise their rights and that the employees that are still at VIP are able to have a better work environment going forward and less fear of repercussions for doing things that are well within their rights to do,” said Swift.
