Welcome in, today is Friday, July twenty-fourth, and we begin with the EEOC's vote to unwind federal workforce demographic reporting. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted two to one Tuesday to propose rescinding the EEO-1 workforce demographic report, a filing in place since nineteen sixty-six that covers roughly seventy-three thousand employers, per the Associated Press. Nothing has changed for filers yet. The obligation stays in force through a thirty-day comment period, with a final hearing set for August eleventh, and Proskauer's Law and the Workplace advises employers to keep self-identification processes running and preserve what they have already collected, since dropping collection early could leave teams scrambling if the rule is delayed or struck down. Chair Andrea Lucas said the reports stand in direct tension with Title Seven's requirement that employment practices be colorblind, and put employer compliance costs near two hundred seventy-five million dollars a year. Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the lone dissent, said the data has long been a central tool for identifying systemic discrimination. State law is the wrinkle. California, Illinois and Massachusetts run their own demographic or pay-data filings, and the Massachusetts statute keys its coverage to the federal requirement. Industry reaction leans toward strengthening internal systems rather than dismantling them. Also today, the D.C. Circuit has rejected the National Labor Relations Board's successor-bar doctrine, the rule insulating an incumbent union's majority status from challenge for up to a year after a new owner takes over a unionized business. In Hospital Menonita de Guayama versus NLRB, decided Tuesday, a divided panel held the Board lacked statutory authority to impose it, per a Mondaq summary of the opinion. The Supreme Court had vacated an earlier ruling in the case and sent it back for reconsideration under Loper Bright, and this is among the first appellate decisions to strike down a Board doctrine in that post-Chevron landscape. The bar still stands at the Board level. Observers read the ruling as shifting leverage in early post-acquisition bargaining. Separately, a federal judge in Brooklyn has permanently blocked New York's NLRB trigger law, which let the state Public Employment Relations Board take up private-sector labor disputes when the federal board could not act. Judge Eric Komitee of the Eastern District of New York held the law preempted under the Supreme Court's nineteen fifty-nine Garmon decision, amNewYork reports, in the suit Amazon filed against the state board last year. The state and the Teamsters had argued the federal board's stretch without a quorum left a gap in enforcement, citing filings that one worker's complaint had not moved past the first step in twenty-nine months. Neither the state board nor the Teamsters had said whether they would appeal. Other states are weighing similar laws. Also from Washington, the Labor Department says employers need not pay for ordinary midday commutes. HR Dive reports the agency took up compensable working time in a pair of opinion letters issued Wednesday. Opinion letters bind no one, and they answer only the facts put to the agency. But they read as a signal of enforcement posture, and wage-hour teams rewriting travel-time and hybrid-schedule pay policies now have something current to point to. One more from the courts. The Third Circuit has held that employers need not, in the court's phrasing, go digging for disabilities. HR Dive reports the case involved a midnight-shift worker fired for sleeping on the job, who had mentioned fatigue and dry eye, but who raised them too late, the appeals court said, to properly invoke the Americans with Disabilities Act. That puts the panel squarely on the line every manager runs into, namely when a passing remark about health becomes notice that triggers the accommodation process. On these facts, the decision turns on timing. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Google employees are circulating a petition seeking guaranteed severance, voluntary buyouts before any mandatory cuts, and an end to forced rating distributions, per HR Executive, with tracked tech layoffs near one hundred fifty-seven thousand. Oracle, Amazon, Cloudflare and Block have all cited AI in twenty twenty-six workforce cuts, and HR Executive reports the reasoning behind each is not the same. Liberation News reports the Supreme Court has invalidated for-cause removal protections for agency commissioners, a ruling whose practical reach over the NLRB and EEOC is still being read. Drug formulary rejections rose sixty-seven percent across payer types, according to HR Executive, delaying or preventing prescribed medications. Hundreds of unionized game developers marched outside six Xbox studios in four cities, per Tech Times and Ars Technica, over four hundred forty union job cuts and stalled first contracts. And finally, Bloomberg Law reports the NLRB has ordered a second Kroger subsidiary to compensate its workers' union for dues lost after it stopped checkoff once the contract expired.