Welcome back, today is Thursday, September third, and we begin with ADP's August payroll print, which landed under consensus. Private employers added thirty-eight thousand jobs in August, against the forty-eight thousand economists polled by Reuters had forecast. That is the ADP National Employment Report, published Wednesday, per Finance and Commerce. Education and health services carried the month with forty-five thousand positions, and construction added twelve thousand. Manufacturing shed seventeen thousand. Professional and business services lost sixteen thousand, which follows our earlier report on that sector's one hundred eighty-eight thousand drop in July hires, and gives talent teams two consecutive reads pointing the same way in the sector that turns first on fourth-quarter headcount plans. AzerNews reports the gains skewed to scale, with employers over five hundred staff making thirty-four thousand hires while mid-sized firms cut two thousand. Industry reaction leans toward composition over the headline, some arguing the aggregate understates how uneven conditions look for smaller businesses and experienced professionals. Friday's Labor Department payrolls report follows. Also today, the National Labor Relations Board has asked the full D.C. Circuit to rehear a decision narrowing its rulemaking power. According to Bloomberg Law, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the board's doctrine temporarily barring successor employers from withdrawing recognition from incumbent unions, and the agency argued in a petition filed Tuesday that the panel misread Supreme Court precedent. That reporting frames the case as carrying major implications for how the circuit reviews labor board decisions after Loper Bright versus Raimondo. Denial of rehearing would leave employers less certain about which board rules on union-management relations still bind them. Among labor-law practitioners, a recurring observation is that the board's near-halt in precedent-setting decisions has pushed appellate courts to fill the gap, with emerging circuit splits flagged as the signal to watch. Separately, Uber will cut roughly three thousand three hundred jobs, about ten percent of its global workforce, with middle management bearing the brunt. HRD Canada reports chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi announced the change Wednesday in a memo to employees published on Uber's newsroom, describing it as a response to organizational complexity built up over five years of rapid growth. The same account puts Uber near thirty-four thousand employees globally at the end of last year, per the company's annual filing, and says revenue has nearly tripled over that span. Shares rose about two percent on the news, which Bloomberg News first reported. Flattening named as the stated design goal is what puts this on HR desks, since span-of-control ratios become the question. Reaction leans critical of the framing rather than the need, with the memo's understated register and its email delivery read by many as a communications misstep. Fewer than half of organizations have any AI policy in place, even as the technology shapes hiring, performance reviews and workforce planning. That finding comes from the Society for Human Resource Management's report Navigating AI in the Workplace, a survey of nearly five thousand nine hundred U.S. employees unveiled at the association's annual conference in Orlando, as reported by HRD Canada. Where a policy does exist, that research found thirty percent of employees have breached it, and thirty-one percent of those would do it again to save time. Adoption is outrunning governance, leaving policy, vendor review and compliance work to arrive after the tools are already in production. A recurring practitioner argument is that governance only becomes real when enforced inside the deployment pipeline, with versioned model cards, logged override paths and named owners for exceptions cited as the minimum evidence trail. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. The Fourth Circuit has backed a worker who cited the Bible in abstaining from a COVID-nineteen vaccine policy, per HR Dive, which notes courts have closely scrutinized the nature of plaintiffs' religious beliefs in mandate challenges. Also per HR Dive, Catalyst leaders argue that as the EEOC moves to end demographic data reporting, following our earlier coverage of that plan, employers must decide whether collecting the data is compliance or leadership. American Airlines will pay two hundred thousand dollars to settle an EEOC disability discrimination suit over a blind employee's accommodation, Insurance Journal reports, under a two-year consent decree the agency announced on August twenty-eighth. And finally, per HR Dive, BambooHR finds workers spend almost half their AI time fixing its output, though U.S. employees remain largely positive about the technology.