Welcome in, today is Tuesday, July twenty-eighth, and we begin with a new occupancy read from CBRE, reported by HR Dive. Peak office use has reached eighty percent, topping pre-pandemic levels, according to CBRE, in reporting from HR Dive. That same account credits two drivers: attendance policies, and managers doing a better job of matching space to what employees say they want. For workplace and real estate teams, a peak-day figure from outside the building gives attendance policy and space plans an external benchmark to be set against, and it arrives while a lot of those plans are being rewritten. Industry reaction leans cautious on reading peak occupancy as proof of a settled return-to-office question. Some in the trade note that peak days sit well above average utilization, and that a meaningful share of booked rooms are reserved and never used. A recurring reframe in the channel is that the live question is no longer whether people come in, but what the space is for, with floorplates tilting away from individual desks toward shared and amenity areas. On the employee side, a counter-current reads rising attendance metrics as a compliance signal rather than a preference one. Also today, a federal appeals court has narrowed the ground an employer can stand on when it doubts a religious vaccine exemption. The Ninth Circuit held that a worker's previous vaccinations should not bar a religious exemption request from a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, per HR Dive, in reporting published yesterday. Central to that decision: the employer's own initial approval of the request showed it understood the request's religious nature. Read practically, that limits a familiar accommodation-review move, building a denial file out of a worker's vaccination history, and it bears on how denials get documented for employers in that circuit from here. Legal-side reaction leans toward reading the decision as a practical limit on sincerity testing, with some commentators also noting the employee worked remotely and treating that as weakening any undue-hardship defense. A further thread positions the ruling against diverging appellate outcomes elsewhere, with some observers pointing to pending Supreme Court petitions as an early signal the question is heading toward higher review. Separately, Battelle Energy Alliance, which manages the Idaho National Laboratory, agreed Monday to pay five million dollars and provide other relief to resolve discrimination charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That is according to the Idaho State Journal and East Idaho News. Per that reporting, the commission's systemic investigation found reasonable cause to believe the company discriminated against a class of more than one hundred employees by denying accommodations for sincerely held religious beliefs or disabilities under its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy. The agency said the conduct included unlawful medical inquiries, denial of accommodations and, in some cases, termination. The company disagrees with those determinations and denies any violation of Title Seven or the Americans with Disabilities Act, its general counsel said, adding it chose to resolve the matter without admitting guilt to avoid an extended dispute. The agreement runs three years. It closes a commissioner's charge filed in twenty twenty-one plus fifteen individual charges from workers at the company's Idaho Falls facilities, and requires back pay, compensatory damages and training for HR personnel on religious and disability accommodation requests. It also puts a dollar figure on what unresolved mandate-era accommodation files can carry at a federal contractor of scale. Reaction among employment-law practitioners tends to frame it less as a vaccine-mandate dispute and more as a disability-accommodation compliance signal, with the weight on the interactive process and the limits on disability-related medical inquiries. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Culture Amp reports that as HR claims more ownership of AI strategy, belief the technology can significantly improve how work gets done has declined, per HR Dive. More than half of employees feel positive about their finances and careers, but three quarters said the cost of living challenged their sense of security, per a Bank of America report. Ford and Unifor have signed a deal including one and a quarter billion dollars in Canadian manufacturing investment, with three percent annual wage increases, a cost-of-living allowance and a productivity bonus, per HRD Canada. And finally, the Senate has positioned itself to vote on a package of nominees to the National Labor Relations Board and other labor agencies before the August recess, Bloomberg Law reports.