U.S. federal agency that administers labor laws and publishes key economic data, including employment, wage, and price statistics.
Diesel averaged $6.30 a gallon on Wednesday, about 68% above its level before the Iran war, according to AAA. Fed district reports describe surcharges spreading, with some firms able to reprice and others absorbing the cost.
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EBSA's Bulletin 2026-03 names three parity enforcement priorities for group health plans while the 2024 rule stays on hold. The statute's comparative-analysis duties still apply, so sponsors setting 2027 benefits cannot treat the pause as cover.
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IRS instructions for the 2026 W-2 limit Box 12 code TT to the half-rate premium on FLSA-required overtime, one-third of time-and-a-half pay. A register's overtime total cannot be copied into the box, CPA Practice Advisor reports.
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DHS proposed a $70,000 fee on a student work-authorization program a day before Labor said it is investigating nine universities over postdoc visas. STAT reports that none of the changes has taken effect. The survey behind a 21% drop in international Ph.D. applications cannot attribute it to any one action.
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JD Vance and the Labor Department suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcers from PERM, the labor certification most employer green cards require. Employees already in those queues pay first, and the officials' fraud charges put past filings under legal scrutiny.
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CNBC's analysis of USCIS data finds two-thirds of Microsoft's 6,258 fiscal 2025 H-1B approvals went to existing employees. That undercuts Vance's claim that visa hires replaced laid-off staff, but the PERM suspension covers green cards, outside this count.
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Twenty IT-services firms filed 31.9% fewer H-1B labor applications so far in FY2026, a third of an 8.1% drop, a dev.to analysis of federal data found. Because the forms also record each employer's offered wage by title, teams that sponsor engineers can price roles against named rivals.
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Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the government will stop taking or processing PERM filings for Microsoft, Adobe and six outsourcing firms. Attorneys told Business Insider the exposure sits with H-1B staff near the six-year cap.
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Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling's department will neither accept nor process PERM green-card filings for eight firms, Microsoft among them. Immigration lawyers say H-1B holders near the six-year visa limit, who need green-card progress to stay, are most exposed.
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US officials are suspending Microsoft, Cognizant, Capgemini and five other named firms from the PERM green-card program, citing alleged fraud. Meta, Amazon and Google keep access, leaving the named firms to recruit against rivals that can still sponsor.
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Treasury has finished automatically enrolling over 60 million children in Trump Accounts, so every eligible child under 18 now has one. Employer contributions still rest on proposed IRS rules, so benefits teams in 2027 open enrollment are pricing an offer on terms that are not yet final.
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Labor Department investigators have subpoenaed nine universities, Harvard and MIT among them, over J-1 visas held by foreign postdocs. The White House did not immediately source Vance's case, a 61% J-1 rate at the schools against a 38% national average.
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US initial jobless claims were 197,000 in the week ended Oct. 3, the fourth straight week below 200,000, Labor Department data showed. Employers are holding on to staff without adding many, so the strain falls on people already out of work while the Federal Reserve keeps raising rates.
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Big Three PBM use among employers with fewer than 1,000 staff fell to 43.8% from 69.7% in a year, a purchaser coalition survey found. For calendar-year plans, federal rebate pass-through attaches at renewal from 2029, so the term signed in the 2027 cycle sets how long a plan waits for it.
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In fiscal 2025 the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division got back more than $259 million in unpaid wages owed to nearly 177,000 workers, the most since 2019. The contractor test is still a proposal, so the reviews employers can finish this quarter without rework are overtime calculations and recorded hours.
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OpenAI's Morgan Dwyer told a New York City Council hearing the company backs the Warner-Budd workforce bill and will publish its own job-impact analysis. The bill would gather voluntary usage data by task, enough to map AI adoption but not to settle what it does to jobs.
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The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell 6.7 points to 81.9 in September, its lowest in 12 years. Jobs data out the same day held steady. The drop traces to fuel and prices, and those are what a spending forecast built on labour figures alone misses.
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US payrolls grew by 29,000 in September against a 90,000 forecast, cutting market odds of an October Fed hike to 15% from about 25%. A December hike is still fully priced, so traders moved the date of the next rise and kept the rise itself.
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US payrolls rose 29,000 in September against a 90,000 forecast and revisions turned July negative, all but ruling out an October Fed hike. Economists cited by Reuters still call inflation the Fed's main input, so Q4 plans can drop the hike case and hold rates flat.
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US initial jobless claims fell to 197,000 last week, below the 200,000 forecast, as employers kept holding off on layoffs. That leaves an October Fed hike turning on inflation, where August's 3.4% PCE reading came in under the 3.7% forecast.
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