Welcome back, today is Tuesday, August eleventh, and we begin with Morningstar's read on an American workforce that has shrunk by more than a million people in a year. The share of Americans working or looking for work fell to sixty-one point four percent in July, the lowest reading since February twenty twenty-one. That is Bureau of Labor Statistics data, reported by Morningstar, and it extends our earlier coverage of the July jobs report. The same account puts the workforce at one hundred sixty-nine point one million, down more than a million from a year ago. Economists quoted there point to baby boomer retirement as the steadiest driver, alongside a falling birth rate and tighter immigration rules and enforcement. Frustration shows up too. Unemployed workers took almost twenty-five weeks on average to find their next job, and discouraged workers numbered five hundred three thousand. Read against open requisitions, hiring difficulty here is a supply question, not a demand one. Industry reaction pushes back on the idea that a smaller labor force makes hiring easier, with a recurring read that the binding gap is demonstrable hands-on experience. Also today, the Senate has restored a Republican majority at the National Labor Relations Board. HR Dive reports Friday's fifty-one to forty-seven vote confirmed Republican James Macy, a Labor Department official, and Democrat David Prouty, in a block of seventy-four nominations. Macy's term runs to August twenty thirty, Prouty's second term to twenty thirty-one, giving the board a three to one Republican majority. Per an Ogletree Deakins blog post carried in that same reporting, the timing avoids a quorum gap, as Prouty's term was due to expire this month, and the three-member majority will now let the board overturn prior precedential decisions. Board tradition requires three affirmative votes to reverse existing precedent, the firm wrote, and one seat remains vacant. Labor-relations policies written against current rulings are now worth rechecking. Practitioner reaction leans toward guessing which precedents go first, with captive-audience meeting rules named repeatedly. The board had gone months without a quorum after the January twenty twenty-five firing of Democrat Gwynne Wilcox, per that account, with the quorum restored last December. Staying with compliance, the Fourth Circuit has held that the Americans with Disabilities Act may require reassigning a worker even when that worker cannot perform the essential functions of the job. That comes from HR Dive's report of the decision, published Friday. Reassignment is the statute's accommodation of last resort, and the same brief notes it has historically proven difficult for employers to administer. That is the whole of what the reporting carries so far. If the reading holds, employers in the Fourth Circuit are looking at vacancy searches as a default step in the interactive process rather than a discretionary one. Separately, Apple has agreed to pay one hundred fifty thousand dollars to settle the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's religious discrimination claims. Reuters reports the joint filing landed Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, nearly a year after the commission sued. The EEOC alleged the manager of Apple's Reston, Virginia store denied a long-tenured Jewish employee, Tyler Steele, time off for the Sabbath, made antisemitic comments, and fired him in January twenty twenty-four, days after he refused to work a Friday. The claims were brought as religious discrimination and retaliation under Title Seven. Apple denied wrongdoing in court filings, and per that reporting the consent decree is not an admission. The decree, as reported by nine to five Mac, also requires religious-discrimination training in the Northern Virginia retail market and two years of reporting accommodation denials to the commission. Employment-law commentary tends to place this within a broader run of EEOC religious-accommodation actions rather than treat it as a one-off. The two-year reporting obligation is the part that outlasts the check. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. HR Dive reports that wage compression, not job cuts, may be the outcome of AI adoption at work, leaving employers to square cost savings against a less financially secure workforce. Research covered by HR Executive finds misaligned compensation decisions compound into millions in cost, surfacing as legal claims, regulatory inquiries or reputational damage. Also from HR Executive, thirty-eight percent of workers have missed work because of financial stress, which moves emergency-savings benefits into the attendance and retention column. And finally, HRD Canada reports most employers plan to create new entry-level AI roles within two years, per Accenture, a counterweight to the entry-level hiring warning we covered last week.