Welcome in, today is Monday, October twelfth, and we begin with a federal suspension that lands on green card sponsors, reported by HR Dive. The Labor Department has suspended Microsoft, Adobe and other large tech employers from the permanent labor certification program, according to HR Dive, which reports the action came Thursday. We have not seen that account matched elsewhere. That program is the certification step ahead of employment based green cards, so standing in it is now a live item for every sponsor to check against its own pending timelines, not only the firms named in that reporting. Immigration practitioner reaction leans toward narrowing the headline rather than amplifying it. The read there is that this freezes new and pending certification filings for the named employers only, and does not by itself void existing work visas or approved green cards, with a recurring open question about how already certified cases get treated. Some also expect a near term legal challenge, testing whether the department has the authority to suspend employers of that size at the certification stage. Also today, a proposed price on hiring international graduates. The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a seventy thousand dollar fee for initial Optional Practical Training participation, HR Dive reports, with colleges on the hook for up to one hundred thousand dollars in fees for each international student seeking to participate. This is a proposal, not a final rule, so the comment period is where it gets contested. Priced at that level, it would reset the main pipeline employers use to hire recent international graduates. Among immigration practitioners, attention is drifting past the fee to a line in the proposal suggesting the program could be wound down entirely without the revenue, which some read as the more consequential half of the filing. A recurring concern is that the cost may not stay where the headline puts it, because the rule appears to let a student or employer pay in the school's place. Separately, a complaint over an automated hiring assessment. The ACLU has filed a complaint in California over the Emotify hiring assessment tool, alleging the test parallels clinical diagnostic tools for autism so closely that it could constitute an unlawful medical examination, according to HR Dive's account of the filing. Those allegations are untested, and we have not seen the complaint reported elsewhere. The claim in that account goes to the instrument rather than the scores, which is a different exposure from the disparate impact arguments most assessment reviews are built around. For anyone running pre employment testing, it moves vendor validation evidence and disability screening review up the list well before any ruling. Now to the data behind those workforce plans. Following our report on September payrolls, twenty nine thousand jobs against forecasts near eighty four thousand, Twenty Four Seven Wall Street sets that print against the full run. From January twenty twenty five through August, first estimates added up to one million nine hundred seven thousand jobs, and revisions cut that to one million eighty five thousand. That is eight hundred twenty two thousand gains revised away, with estimates reduced in sixteen of twenty months. The argument is that the Federal Reserve's September hike was set against numbers overstating the economy. That read also puts August openings at seven point zero eight million, down three and a half percent in a month, while jobless claims held near one hundred ninety seven thousand. Hiring and pay plans built on the first estimates were describing a stronger market than the revised series shows. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. HR Dive reports a Seyfarth Shaw partner calling the EEOC's fiscal twenty twenty six light on filings and heavy on messaging, at ninety seven merit lawsuits. Global call center employment is five point three percent below its December twenty twenty three peak, per a Revelio Labs report cited by Startup Fortune, ending more than a decade of growth. An iHire report says employers describe fraudulent candidates while job seekers describe scam postings, per HR Dive, a credibility gap running both ways through the funnel. And finally, Resume dot I O estimates office attendance costs an employee about six thousand seven hundred dollars a year, and about sixteen thousand for working parents paying childcare, per HR Dive.