Welcome in, today is Wednesday, August twenty-sixth, and we begin with a fresh projection from HR Executive on where employer health care costs are heading next year. United States employer health care costs are projected to climb nine and a half percent in twenty twenty-seven. That figure comes from HR Executive, which reports the projection marks a fourth straight year of cost trends approaching double digits, extending one of the most sustained stretches of health care inflation employers have faced in decades. Four years of compounding at that pace lands squarely on twenty twenty-seven plan design, cost sharing and headcount budgeting, while renewal season still has room to move. HR Dive reports on an Aon analysis finding employers cover more than eighty percent of the burden, though employees will also be hit by rising costs. This follows our earlier report on employers tightening benefits as medical spend moved to the center of cost and workforce strategy. Industry reaction leans skeptical that network discounts alone can hold the line, with some pointing to the stop-loss and reinsurance layer, loss ratios at or near break-even and back-to-back double-digit renewal increases, as the place the strain shows first. Also today, a major employer is taking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to court. Bloomberg Law reports The New York Times filed suit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging the commission failed to properly address Freedom of Information Act requests seeking records on its handling of White workers' race bias charges. Per that account, the Times is fending off the commission's separate claims that it discriminated against a White male editor. HR Dive reports the company alleged the agency has dragged its feet and ignored its inquiries about when the information will be produced. An employer suing the enforcement agency for its own enforcement records, while defending a claim from that same agency, is a marker of how contested the commission's current civil-rights posture has become. Separately, layoffs. Newsweek reports that public WARN filings show employers with workforce reductions taking effect in September, among them FedEx, Kroger, Chick-fil-A, Chime Financial and WellStar Health System. Per that same reporting, one tracker counted roughly three thousand two hundred notices affecting about two hundred eighty-four thousand workers across forty-four states through August twenty-fifth, slightly below the same point last year, with July unemployment at four point one percent per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Elevated notices without a clear national surge is the backdrop for fall workforce planning, and the filings can still be amended or rescinded. Some observers are treating daily WARN aggregates as a real-time leading indicator ahead of official data, and a recurring concern is method over volume, with abrupt notice-by-email removals drawing the sharpest criticism. Now to management structure. HR Executive argues the so-called Great Flattening is shrinking the management layer without preparing the managers left behind. New research cited in that argument finds just six percent of leaders say their middle managers companywide are ready to lead change, a number that reads straight through to spans of control and manager-development budgets. Some in the trade push back on the savings case, describing coaching, translation and coordination load quietly reappearing on remaining leaders and their teams; others in technical and research settings read the cuts as removing capability rather than bureaucracy. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. The American Alliance for Equal Rights announced a settlement with Deloitte, resolving a complaint the Alliance filed with the federal government, Florida and Indiana in the Northern District of Texas. HR Dive reports the Fourth Circuit dismissed several charges after a worker's disability trial, but affirmed one, letting him keep most of a twenty-two point one million dollar award. Bloomberg Law reports the EEOC sued Kenosha Nissan on August eighteenth, alleging it pushed Black employees to quit and fired a Black manager who opposed racial harassment. And finally, the National Labor Relations Board referred an attorney for possible discipline over a filing that, per Bloomberg Law, cited board decisions that do not exist.