Welcome in, today is Wednesday, September second, and we begin with eight state and local civil rights agencies pressing the EEOC to keep workforce demographic reporting alive, per StateScoop. The EEOC voted in July, two to one, to advance a proposal rescinding the EEO-1 collection, the rule that since nineteen sixty-six has required private employers with one hundred or more workers to report staff race, sex, ethnicity and job category. That is according to StateScoop and the Portland Tribune. Chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement the reports risk hindering enforcement of equal employment law and raise constitutional concerns, and the commission put the annual compliance burden above two hundred seventy-three million dollars. On August twenty-fourth, agencies from Illinois, Oregon, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and the District of Columbia filed a joint letter opposing the move, writing that ending the collection would obscure disparities and make discrimination harder to identify. Take out the national dataset and employers lose the baseline most pay and representation audits are built on. That same reporting says state offices could then request the numbers employer by employer. Industry reaction leans cautious, a recurring warning being that purging demographic records now would be premature, since the agency can still demand that data in an individual charge. Also today, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters says workers at Amazon's DJT6 facility in Riverside, California, will launch a one-day unfair labor practice strike. We have the union's announcement and no matching account elsewhere. That announcement, dated September first, describes DJT6 as Amazon's largest warehouse in the United States, and does not carry a company response. Scale is what makes it worth watching: a stoppage framed as protected activity at the biggest site in the network is a live test of whether that tactic travels to other buildings. Reaction is thin, and the little of it on point leans skeptical that a one-day walkout at a single site pressures an operator able to absorb a short stoppage. Separately, professional and business services shed one hundred eighty-eight thousand hires in July. Per Tech Times, that was the only sectoral change the Bureau of Labor Statistics flagged as significant in Tuesday's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which otherwise showed openings at roughly seven point three million and hires, quits and layoffs essentially flat, with June's openings revised down by one hundred seventy-seven thousand. That sector covers staffing, consulting and technical services, according to the same account, firms that add headcount early in a demand surge and cut early when clients pull back. Which is why the drop reads as a forward signal on hiring plans rather than a lagging one, landing before Friday's payrolls and the Fed's September sixteenth vote. Reaction leans toward the internals over the headline number, with some describing hires and quits near post-pandemic lows as a frozen market rather than a cooling one. Employees now rank pay growth, long-term incentives and more frequent spot bonuses above wellness benefits. That is Gartner research, reported Tuesday by HR Dive, which sets the finding against mounting costs, and it points at renewal-season budgets moving out of programs and into cash. Benefits practitioners lean toward reframing it rather than accepting it. Several argue thin enthusiasm for wellbeing programs may reflect an awareness gap as much as a preference shift, and a recurring test in that discussion is whether a benefit lowers what an employee actually pays or merely helps them cope with paying it. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Quebec's new secularism law is in force, and HRD Canada reports employers are revising religious policy in response. Ford will pay two point three million dollars to settle EEOC allegations of racially targeted graffiti at its Buffalo stamping plant, Bloomberg Law reports. The EEOC found reasonable cause that Cisco failed to act to protect Palestinian, Arab and Muslim workers from harassment, per a June ninth determination letter reviewed by Bloomberg Law and Al Jazeera. It is an administrative finding, not a court ruling. And finally, HRD Canada reports CHRO turnover ran above average in the first half of twenty twenty-six, alongside elevated CEO turnover.