Welcome back, today is Wednesday, August twelfth, and we start with an appeal-court ruling on equity compensation during a notice period, reported by HRD Canada. The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that a former Meta employee is entitled to four point seven million US dollars in restricted stock units that should have vested after the company told him he was fired. That is HRD Canada's report on the court's August seventh decision. The employee is University of Toronto professor Daniel Wigdor, who joined Facebook Canada as a research director in twenty twenty and was fired at the end of twenty twenty-three. A lower court had found he was not entitled to the units. The appeal court came out the other way. The reasoning is the part to read against your own documents. Per that account, the court held that Meta cannot alter an employee's compensation scheme during the termination notice period. The same reporting notes that at Meta, restricted stock units vest in quarterly increments over a four-year span and carry no value before they vest, and that company policy has employees forfeit all unvested units immediately. So any plan whose language switches off vesting at the moment of dismissal now sits against an appellate decision in Ontario, and the exposure scales with the size of the grant. Termination clauses, vesting schedules and the interaction between them are the drafting surface here, and the ruling is in force now. Also today, the function writing everyone else's workforce plans is showing up in the data itself. Of the thirty job domains in Visier's report Hidden in the Headcount, HR was among eleven that posted a decline in headcount share, while data and analytics and product management grew fastest, up forty-nine and thirty-nine percent. HRD Canada carries the findings, which draw on more than three point six million employee records from over one hundred fifty-five enterprise-sized organizations, tracked from twenty twenty-two through May of this year. HR's hiring share fell further than its headcount, down thirty-one percent through the start of twenty twenty-five before rebounding nine percent since. That pattern, the report says, reflects teams managing a current workforce, navigating compliance and handling workplace conflict rather than hiring for growth. Within HR, the same reporting says hiring of DEI professionals stopped entirely in the final month of the analysis, a halt the report itself cautions likely reflects changes unrelated to AI. Industry reaction leans skeptical that adoption equals transformation, with a recurring test being whether teams actually gain capacity rather than whether headcount shifts. Separately, an argument about what a shrinking labor force means for automation spending. HR Dive reports an economist's read that the contraction in the American labor market, described in that account as historic, underlines the need for artificial intelligence at work. It follows our earlier coverage of the workforce falling by more than a million people over the past year. The argument turns on who is stepping back. That read points to a pullback from employment by workers aged sixty-five and older, and holds that it may partly allay concerns that demand for artificial intelligence will fall short of a coming surge in supply. In other words, the labor-supply story and the AI-capacity story are treated as one question, not two. This is analysis rather than new data, and it belongs to its author. For workforce planners, it is a framing that puts headcount modeling and automation investment on the same page, which is a different exercise from running them as separate lines in a plan. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. HR Executive reports that Visa's two thousand six hundred job cuts, which we covered last month, reached senior ranks, including six vice presidents and thirty-seven senior directors. Personnel Today reports a record one point two four million people are now employed on zero-hours contracts, citing unpredictable shifts, last-minute cancellations and fluctuating pay. And finally, HRD Canada reports that United States employers named cancer their top unmanaged cost risk, in a look at whether benefit design is weighted too heavily toward GLP-one drugs and mental health.