Policies that ban employees from discussing pay.
Confidentiality rules that include "wages," "salary," "compensation," or "payroll information."
Managers who tell employees they are not allowed to ask coworkers what they earn.
HR departments that discipline employees for talking about their pay.
Employers that fire employees for creating or sharing salary spreadsheets.
Stop it.
Federal labor law protects discussions of employees' pay data by non-supervisory employees. Period.
Vermont Information Processing learned that lesson the hard way.
Software engineer Christopher Bendel and a coworker compared salaries over Google Workspace. Then Bendel created a spreadsheet. Within hours, about 25 employees added their pay information. Management found it, hated it, disabled it, and fired him.
VIP defended the termination by calling Bendel disruptive, disloyal, hostile, and guilty of misusing company technology. The D.C. Circuit was not buying it.
The court upheld the NLRB's finding that VIP unlawfully fired Bendel because of his protected activity. The timing mattered. VIP had planned a new role for him before discovering the spreadsheet. Within roughly 90 minutes, he was gone. The shifting explanations looked like what they were: excuses.
The court gave VIP a partial win as to the other three fired employees, but not because salary sharing lost protection. The issue was procedural. The Board relied on a broader "workplace conditions" theory than the complaint had fairly charged.
Do not miss the forest for that procedural tree.
The core lesson is unchanged. Federal labor law protects pay transparency among non-supervisory employees, union or no union. Few things are more obviously about mutual aid or protection than employees comparing wages to determine whether they are paid fairly.
That means you cannot ban pay discussions. You cannot tell employees their wages are confidential. You cannot discipline them for asking coworkers what they make. You cannot fire them for creating a salary spreadsheet. And you cannot launder retaliation through complaints about attitude, disruption, loyalty, or culture fit.
Employers may still enforce neutral rules about working time, access to systems, trade secrets, harassment, threats, and sabotage. But those rules must be real, consistently enforced, and not a pretext to punish protected pay talk.
If your pay practices are defensible, you should be able to defend them. If they are not, the spreadsheet is not the problem. Your pay practices are.